| Fun With Freeware 1 |
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When some of us were children, our parents expected us to help with some of the household chores because everyone should take a share of the work involved in keeping a household going. Other chores were priced and, if we did them properly, our parents would pay us for our efforts, in the form of 'pocket money'. We would shine shoes, clean the sinks and bath and pull weeds, for example. At the end of the week, there would be a reckoning up. We could take all the money in cash or we could ask to have part of it saved for us. Any money that was saved for us had an extra 10% added to it, to encourage us to get into the habit of saving. The older we got, the more chores became available to do, such as painting the outside of the house or digging over the vegetable patch, and the more keen we were to do them whenever we thought about the money they would earn us. By and large, we
received about the same amount as most of our schoolfriends, although we
usually did a little better in the winter when there was snow to clear
away and firewood to be fetched, but most of them did not have to do
chores to get their pocket money. When we complained that our friends were given money without
being expected to work for it, our parents would tell us that, far from
envying our friends, we should feel sorry for them. They explained that,
because they were being taught to expect to receive money without having
to exchange anything for it, those children would grow up expecting the
same situation to exist in adult life. Even so, we occasionally felt hard done by when we thought about our friends, lazing around and getting their pocket money for nothing but most of the time we felt proud of ourselves and, sometimes even a little bit superior to those who did not 'earn their keep' as our parents called it. Then they would tell us "Don't feel superior because you are able to get paid for doing chores. There are many children in the world who work from dawn until dark and are grateful if they receive a crust of bread to eat. You are among the lucky children of the world and should appreciate your good fortune." Later in life, as we watched many of our schoolfriends falling into all the traps our parents had told us about, we learned to be grateful for the upbringing that kept us independent and prepared to work hard for what we wanted. The habit of saving money up for later stuck with us and we found ourselves able to enjoy things that we wanted and to enjoy them all the more because we had earned them and had sacrificed meaningless petty gratifications in order to accumulate enough cash to buy things we could really enjoy. The other day, a mother told us how she is trying to give her children a proper upbringing with regards to the principle of earning the rewards of life. She doesn't have a great deal of money and is bringing up her boys alone, so she cannot pay them extra money for doing more than their set chores. Instead, she has found a novel way of rewarding her sons. She pays them in kilobytes! The boys have a computer at home. It is second-hand and is not the latest thing, but it works. There is no Internet access in their home, partly because they cannot afford it and partly because she does not want her sons exposed to the dangers of roaming the worldwide web unguided. This lady searches the Internet, at the local public Internet facility, for freeware games that she knows the boys will like, and that she does not consider bad for them. The boys can earn each game by exchanging their efforts for sets of kilobytes. When enough kilobytes have been earned to cover those of a game, it is handed over to them. Good idea? We certainly think so!
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