My Programming Rates

To answer the question, "Why am I billed an hour for what it took you 5 minutes to do?"

An engineer is called in because a machine broke down. He looks at it, makes a cross with chalk on a machine part and says 'replace this part'. He charges $50,000. The manager is out-raged and requests an itemized bill to justify the cost. The engineer replies: Chalk – $1, knowing where to make the cross $49,999.

A programmer finishes the job in two minutes and writes the client a bill. The client looks at the bill. "Twenty-five dollars? But you only wrote two lines of code! How can you charge so much?"
The programmer takes back the bill and writes:
Two minutes of writing code: $2
Knowing what to write: $23