# Chapter 027: A Fee Schedule
On August 10, 2012, Wu Chunhua put up the new price list on the side of the counter. She stepped back when she was done and realized the phone cord was blocking the bottom line again.
She moved the phone aside. Ye Yan happened to see that line: Training, 60 yuan an hour.
“You charge for teaching someone how to open a file?”
“Then tell me how long you’ll need to teach them.”
He didn’t answer. The computer that had lost coins the previous summer had long since been returned. After that, the shop went on repairing computers and ringing up sales as usual, while the itemized price list went through several revisions. At first, it only listed diagnostics and backups. Then they started doing data migrations, so migration was added to the list. One time, the lesson ran until dark, and Junzi was still on the phone apologizing to the next customer. That was how the line they were looking at now came to be.
Ye Yan thought some things were easy enough to explain on the spot and didn’t need to be written into the price list. He pressed down the lifted corner of the tape without peeling it off.
The small company they were visiting that morning had three computers. The people using them had changed, but work materials were still scattered across the desktops and old folders according to everyone’s habits. Wu Chunhua had made a list based on what they said they needed. After looking it over, Ye Yan changed “organize entire drive” to “designated work files.” Junzi checked the travel and shop workload, then set the prices: fifty for backup, thirty for cleanup, eighty for migration, and training charged by time. The customer would provide their own storage drive, and no hardware would be replaced.
As they were leaving, Xiaoyezi noticed Ye Yan had tucked a piece of paper into his notebook. It didn’t have a customer’s phone number on it, but it did have the word ASICMINER.
“Are you looking at this?”
“Saw it on the forum last night. A new post, raising money to make chips specifically for this.” He tucked the paper away. “They haven’t made it yet. I asked a couple of questions, but got no reply.”
She recognized the username that had posted it, friedcat, and glanced again at his notebook. But Ye Yan had already picked up his tool bag and was urging her to bring today’s checklist. She followed him out, and the question she had meant to ask faded with her footsteps.
The company’s door was unlocked. Someone inside waved them in while holding a phone receiver. The woman who handled the forms moved out of her chair and said yesterday’s spreadsheet was on the desktop, and everything else was about the same.
There were three folders named “New Folder” on the desktop. She opened the first and said it wasn’t the one, then opened the second. She found it in the third, but it was still the day before yesterday’s version.
Ye Yan asked where she had opened it from yesterday. She replied that it had been right there a moment ago, tracing a circle on the mouse with her finger, until she finally remembered the other computer.
It took half the morning to check the designated materials on all three machines. Ye Yan dealt with the old programs that kept popping up on startup, kept the files the customer needed, and moved the scattered work folders to the agreed location. Xiaoyezi went through the files with two employees. One recognized them quickly; the other kept answering “Where do I save it?” with “It’s saved.” They made separate working copies on their own drives. Ye Yan spot-checked that the files could be read, then returned the drives to the person in charge.
When it came time to teach them how to save and retrieve files, Ye Yan gave up his chair to the woman who handled the forms. She kept nodding while she watched him, but when it was her turn, she still saved everything to the desktop as usual.
“You can save it on the desktop,” she said. “I’ll remember where it is.”
The other employee had already found the new location and was waiting to go eat. Hearing this, they sat back down. “You’ll remember, but I won’t tomorrow.”
Xiaoyezi smiled and asked her to open a new blank spreadsheet and fill in just the two items that needed to ship today. She didn’t take over the mouse. Ye Yan was checking the wiring behind the third computer case. Xiaoyezi had been about to call him over to teach them again, but when she saw his arm wedged under the edge of the desk, she pulled her chair closer and helped the woman look for the file herself.
She saved it in the wrong place the first time. After closing it and searching again, the woman’s smile gradually disappeared, and she tried to get Xiaoyezi to open it for her directly.
“I’ll know whether we can leave only when you find it yourself this time,” Xiaoyezi said.
They retraced the original steps, and on the second try she finally saved it in the right place. The other employee completed the task on their own and picked up their lunchbox to leave. But this woman asked again, just before closing the window, whether she needed to save the changes she had made.
Xiaoyezi had already stood up, but had to sit back down. The smell of lunch drifted in from outside as the training time on the form slowly passed an hour.
When the person in charge returned and asked how much longer it would take, Ye Yan glanced at the clock but didn’t say it would just be a couple of quick pointers. He asked them to wait until she could find the spreadsheet on her own, and said they would count that as the end.
Ninety minutes later, the woman opened that day’s materials from the agreed folder, then found the migrated old form on her coworker’s computer. She thought Xiaoyezi’s note showing where to find it took up too much space, but still stuck it beside the screen, moving the phone number she had originally posted to the back.
During the acceptance check, the person in charge asked each employee to find a document they needed, and opened a copy from her own drive as well. After testing all three computers one by one, she signed the checklist and took out 250 yuan.
“Could you come by every month from now on? Don’t wait until no one can find anything before calling someone in.”
Ye Yan called Junzi first. Xiaoyezi told Wu Chunhua how long the training had taken. She was checking another form and asked Xiaoyezi to wait a moment. Once she was free, she confirmed the start and end times: ninety minutes of training, ninety yuan. With the first three items, that made 250 yuan total. No new hardware costs were folded in, and neither was the time employees needed to eat.
On the phone, Junzi first said that Xinyu could take on this kind of work too, his voice louder than usual. Then he asked what the three computers would mainly be used for going forward and agreed to try it for a month: 180 yuan for two visits, covering checks and maintenance of the agreed working copies. Any additional migration or training would be discussed separately. He asked the customer to leave their drive at the shop; they wouldn’t be on call whenever someone wanted them.
Back at the shop, the 250 yuan, along with the signed form, was handed to Junzi. He counted it in front of them, recorded it as Xinyu’s income, and put the monthly maintenance form in the appointment folder separately. The first month would start on August 20, with two visits scheduled for 3 p.m. on August 20 and September 3. Ye Yan would make both visits, with Xiaoyezi helping check the materials. He changed the existing delivery job for the afternoon of the 20th so he could go himself, and made room in the shop schedule for the second visit too. Then he called back and asked them to make a note of it. The 180 yuan had not been collected yet.
Wu Chunhua didn’t come by until the afternoon. After reviewing how long the work had actually taken, she added “time charged according to agreed tasks” to the price list, then asked Ye Yan to look it over.
“For today’s job, are you still going to charge by the word?”
Ye Yan circled the ninety minutes on the form. “We’ll stick to this. If someone only asks how to open something, we don’t need to make them pay for an hour.”
She gave a quiet “mm” and put the paper away. Junzi went to the door to take in a computer. Only then did she open her bag and pull out the forms she still hadn’t finished checking on her end. She said irritably, “I haven’t even finished settling things on my side, and you’re waiting for the numbers on yours. I ask what time it started, while someone next to me is urging me to sign a form. Trying to listen to both sides is giving me a headache.”
Xiaoyezi pointed out the two times for her. Wu Chunhua connected them with her pen and told her not to write them several lines apart next time. Then she bent over her own forms and checked them, no longer clinging to her earlier irritation.
Two days later, Ye Yan got a reply to the two private messages he had sent.
He had asked whether there would be a machine to take home after buying a share, and what would happen if the project didn’t work out. The reply told him to read the public statement again: he was buying a stake in the project, there was no finished product yet, and development might fail. They couldn’t give him a date by which he was guaranteed to receive a machine.
After reading it, Ye Yan sat alone for quite a while. Xiaoyezi went to the counter to get a blank form. He called her over and turned his notebook around.
“I’ll buy ten shares, one coin. If they can’t make it, I’ll take the loss on that one coin.”
She sat beside him and first looked over the figures he had worked out himself. He didn’t ask how much it might be worth later, or change the number of shares based on her reaction. Wu Chunhua had read the offering statement and the reply, and told him to list the money in the platform separately from the shares. The three of them reviewed where the funds would go and signed off on this decision. The expense would come only from Ye Yan’s personal fifteen coins.
Junzi didn’t sign the subscription decision. He separately agreed to let Ye Yan use the shop’s inspection machine after closing and check the shared wallet records. The shop’s fifteen coins would remain untouched, and the machine still had jobs to handle the next day.
On the evening of August 12, Ye Yan personally transferred 1.01 coins to the address provided by his own GLBSE account, and paid an additional 0.0005 coin in on-chain fees. Once the funds arrived, he bought ten shares and checked the transaction record and his share count: one coin in principal, 0.005 coin deducted by the platform for this order, and the remaining 0.005 coin still in his account.
Xiaoyezi recorded the local coins, the platform balance, and the ten shares separately. They confirmed that the updated wallet backup could be read. The old drive went back into the shallow box inside the counter, and the test USB drive was returned to the original drawer, which Junzi locked.
When Wu Chunhua brought her child in, Ye Yan was putting away the last few records. The child was holding a paper pinwheel, showing it to Aunt Lan first, then turning straight to Dad and asking him to leave a little space around the stuck blade.
Xiaoyezi moved closer too, wanting to look at it beside Ye Yan. He leaned down to compare it with the paper. The child stood between them, held the pinwheel up high, and insisted it had to be fixed that night.
The transaction records still hadn’t been sorted out. Ye Yan set the pinwheel down, but Xiaoyezi handed it back to him. Then she turned and sorted the deposit, purchase, and shareholding papers, leaving them for him to check one last time.
“I’ll take care of this. You go help her with it.”
Ye Yan checked the records Xiaoyezi had sorted, put his notebook in his bag, and then took the child outside. The child ran ahead holding the pinwheel, then came back after a couple of steps to grab his hand.
Xiaoyezi watched for a while, then went back to the counter and moved the company’s two appointments to the front of the folder. Remembering how the employee had finally found the right file, first complaining that the note was too big, then reaching out to press it firmly in place, she made a note beside the appointment: next time, have her do it herself again.