Goods in Leu of payment

[David Nereson]

Robin Stevens wrote:

>  One of my memorable payments for a tuning was for tuning a Player piano.
>  
> When I finished the old man said to me..."I can't pay you"...But, I 
> can give you a First World War .303 rifle and a violin!!
>  
> It suited me fine, as I was into target shooting in my younger days. 
> The rifle had a good quality target shooting scope. It even had 
> "Mother" engraved on the butt.
> As for the violin...I have never used it.
>  
> Robin Stevens
>  
> /-------Original Message-------/
>  
> /*From:*/ Pianotech <mailto:pianotech@ptg.org>
> /*Date:*/ 07/05/05 16:52:22
> /*To:*/ tune4u@earthlink.net <mailto:tune4u@earthlink.net>; Pianotech 
> <mailto:pianotech@ptg.org>
> /*Subject:*/ Re: Sweet!
>  
> At 10:49 PM 7/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
> >What's the best or most unusual "extra" you've been offered.
>  
> The dentist's wife gave me a big plastic bowl full of sticky candy! Maybe
> she was trying to drum up business?
>  
> Down in Stockton, CA I got a big grocery bag of walnuts in the shell, new
> crop. Delicious, easy to break open. And somebody gave me some elk heart
> and liver once, frozen, luckily. Flowers, big bundles of them. Cookies
> (usually I don't get home with them.) A dozen eggs from her own chickens.
> Plants! Shasta daisies, autumn crocus, iris, etc. One family nearby, on
> land which the lady's grandparents had settled, with 100-year-old giant
> sequoias her grandfather had planted, gave me starts of the local bleeding
> heart (cutleaf, a bucket full of little starts, I had to run home and 
> plant
> them pronto), the native currant with some of the duff from under the
> sequoia to make it feel at home, and a walnut tree bred by a 90-year-old
> local retired prof. They had gotten it at a class they took, and 
> planted it
> a bad place. All this stuff thrived, and the bleeding heart hitched a ride
> with the hostas when I moved them to my new house.
>  
> Several customers have given me old tools and supplies from tuner
> relatives, long dead ones. Usually they smelled fusty from damp storage,
> but some are really neat old 19th century stuff. I also found a nice old
> letoff tool under an inch of dust on the floor of an old upright, which I
> was told I was welcome to keep. Rosewood handle, brass ferule, nicely
> shaped so it doesn't bend the eyelet as easily as the new ones.
>  
> This isn't a tip from anyone, but after tuning at a big apartment complex,
> I found a beautiful big Japanese beechwood rocking chair just dumped 
> in the
> dumpster. It took me twenty minutes to rearrange my Tercel hatchback 
> enough
> to fit it in. I had to get it foam for cushions, and upholstery 
> fabric, but
> I've used it ever since. Here's Donnie Byrd sitting in it, when she 
> visited
> and we worked on a grand action together.
>  
> Grapes. Meyer lemons, by the bag. (delicious, so mild!) I really miss the
> Meyer lemons. If I make a greenhouse, I'll plant one. Apples, also by the
> bag. Plums. A couple of really good nursery catalogs. A video of the life
> of Christ. I gave it to a Sunday School.
>  
> Newly arrived in Oregon, way out east in Sweet Home, somebody raided his
> woodpile (He had a cast iron stove), and gave me beautiful big hunks of
> cherry, walnut, maple, and (the real treat!) several big rounds of clear
> Pacific Yew, garnered from slash piles. They were stripping the bark back
> then to make taxol for cancer patients. What a waste! Glad when they
> synthesized the stuff. I called him a couple of years later to see if 
> there
> was any more yew, but it was all gone.
>  
> Back when I was just starting in the business, a customer out in the
> country, sort of run-down place, heard me talk about getting tools, and he
> reached down and picked up an old, rusty, bent chisel from the gravel
> driveway (nylon handle, though) and handed it to me. "There! Now 
> you've got
> a chisel." <grin> I took it home, unbent it, ground a new bevel, blasted
> the rust off it, more or less, sharpened it, and have used it more 
> than any
> of the good ones ever since. It was such a wreck I never had to worry 
> about
> what I did with it.
>  
> Okay, now, what's the most unusual thing you have _given_ to customers? I
> gave one of mine two Washington hawthorn seedlings, which she says have
> grown well. Another's daughter found a home for two huge miniature rose
> bushes which I was eager to get rid of.
>  
> Susan
>  
>
> 	
> 	
>
jeez......in 25 years I've gotten maybe a dozen cookies and 4 or 5 
tomatoes....oh, and an old dehumidifier rod or two, usually with the 
cord so cracked and brittle that it's unsable.   And once in a great 
while they write the check for $5 or $10 over what I asked.  --D.N.