A Day in the Life of...

Several months ago, a close friend gave me a broken Dell Optiplex GX240 that his wife had had. They had come into some money and repaid me $3,000 in loans. They had bought new systems and didn't need the old one and they didn't feel like repairing it. I diagnosed the problem, bought a new part for it that cost me $80 and fixed it. I used the system as a Linux workstation for remastering KNOPPIX Live CDs that I've used at work. It was very handy for that. Then, out of the blue, he asked for it back. He planned to use it as a server for his wife's psychologist because the old server they built was underpowered. Now they will turn around and charge the psychologist for the "new" server and the server migration and such. At first, I turned them down but when I got home from work, I got an email from him offering me a laptop in exchange for it. I turned it down because it would be an underpowered laptop. It was his wife's old laptop, and she's hard on equipment. I countered that if they'd pay me $100 which was my costs for fixing the system, they could have it back. He told me flat out that he couldn't afford that. He told me that they owed the IRS $4000 in back taxes for his wife's Social Security Disability Benefits that they had to sue the government to give them in the first place. Their lawyer had told them that the benefits weren't taxable, but the IRS begs to differ. I told him that he could pay me after the server migration, but he didn't like that idea either. I went to bed, but couldn't sleep. I decided that I shouldn't let a thing get in the way of a friendship, so I got up, yanked my hard drive out of it, and drove it over to them. I get home and he calls me asking me if I have any hard drive rails. He'd given me two sets when he gave me the system. I found the spare set and drove them back over to him. (They live across the street in another apartment complex.) This whole episode bothers me. I mean, I can ignore my own hurt because I can live without that system. It was nice when I had it, but I'm not hurting if it's gone. I suppose I realize that my friends will likely sink further into debt the way things are going if they have to ask me to give back a "gift". Maybe that, I don't know. But something really bothers me about this whole mess.