Monday, July 21, 2014

Giving to Get

People get all tangled up on this as if a gift is another form of a purchase but gifts work the other way around.  There is no effect unless you expect nothing at all ... well, except to make someone happy.

About fifteen years ago I enjoyed writing Perl scripts for Unix as this was kind of like playing with a Rubix Cube after dealing with mainframe melodrama.  I wrote quite a few of them and gave them away on Duck Soup.  One of them was a Guestbook script and those were fairly common at the time. Mine was fairly good and people downloaded it.

One of the people who downloaded it was Yevette.  She wanted the software to put a guestbook on her own Web site and we talked as she needed some assistance.

Now it's fifteen years later and she gives me a place to live without asking a thing in return.  She is easily one of the most generous people I have ever known.  Cat is just like that too and they are a very special class of woman.


(Other things happened in the interim but they don't change the point.)

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