^ I had that recently. I do a bit of freelance cartography for people at my uni. Four many people writing a thesis, a map is a really useful method of presentation, both for a written report and oral presentation. Often they're quite simple maps, but the person asking for someone to make them doesn't know how to do things that to me are quite easy, like geocoding (taking the text form of a road address and working out its XY coordinates). The simplicity of what they want usually means I can whip up a Python script to do it for me, even using methods I wrote for someone else but just tweaking them.

Anyway, the person I did this for most recently offered 300 for what they thought would be 10 hours work. When I finished it in less than two because I had all my scripts already, they disputed paying me the full $300 because it didn't take ten hours.

So, they'd have more been willing to pay someone to manually play around with their data and waste time, than for someone to do it more efficiently? It annoys me when people only look at the face value of the time spent doing the task and not how long it takes to get the skill that allows you to do it quickly.