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I know that I'm going to be stressed today ... hell after a computer crash just a moment ago lost me a whole heap of work I'm stressed already ... but that's ok because today my doctor wants me to be stressed.

I guess I should make that a little clearer ... my body is going to be put through a chemically induced stress test because there's a family history of ill-health and early diagnosis ... via this stress test ... can help me survive a whole lot longer than some of my relatives. So I'm going to spend about four hours this morning sitting around doing nothing while I undergo a stress test.

Somehow I think I'm finding the thought of four hours of doing nothing more stressful than the test might be.

I had an interesting experience yesterday that I still can't quite get my head around. It's one of those experiences that leaves you wondering if you didn't miss something that was vitally important ... some basic piece of a puzzle that you can't complete until you find it.

For some time now there's been a person doing work for my business. It's fairly specialized work and his previous employer dumped him after outsourcing the work to India. I don't get a lot enquiries for the type of work that requires his skills but I've been giving this person some other things to do for some time now just so that he has an income.

I guess I've been influenced by a lot of his posts on Twitter where he often complains about being so broke that he can't afford decent clothes. So I try to help him where I can.

Last week I emailed him to see if he was interested in doing a whole bunch of security updates on a number of e-commerce scripts that we've installed for some of our clients. It certainly wasn't a huge amount of work and was going to take about a week at the most for which I was prepared to pay a thousand dollars.

If you're used to making big bucks then a thousand dollars in a week doesn't sound like much but when times are tough not many people are going to pass up a thousand dollars for some fairly basic work.

But that's what this guy did ... his email to me was that if a job didn't pay at least $1200 a week he just wasn't interested. Five minutes later he was back on Twitter complaining about how poor he was.

And now you know why I'm still wondering what on earth I missed there. For this job we're not talking a seven day week and a 20 hour day here ... and we're not talking about something that was extremely involved and incredibly difficult either. Yet a thousand dollars wasn't enough so he turned the work down and continued to cry about how poor he was.

I'm still wondering if there's something I missed and that's where the sad facts of life for providers comes in.

Of course no one wants to work for nothing and if you need to employ someone for a task and you want to get a reasonable result you have to be prepared to pay for it but everyone in a situation like this needs to have a realistic view of things.

If you're looking for someone to do some work for you ... work that will result in something that will make you money ... then you have to be prepared to a reasonable rate for it. And I would suggest that a 'reasonable rate' here means that you have to be prepared to pay more than sweatshop rates if you want the best outcomes from the end result.

At the same time the person who is doing the work needs to be prepared to do the work for a reasonable rate and not expect to get top dollar for every job. In fact when times are tough you need to be prepared to lower your hourly rate because many of those who might hire you just can't afford to pay a huge amount for the work they want done.

That's not to say that you're not worth the rate you would like to charge but when times are tough if you want to eat you will have to bring your rates down to something that the marketplace can afford.

If you're not prepared to bring your rates down I'm sure there are plenty of people who are and you can join the broke chorus on Twitter and sing loud and long about how you're so poor you can't even afford a pair of new jeans.