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Oh yes, and that was the other idea I had in the pub last night.
Now we're in the Internet era, it's possible and fairly frequent for random people to do favours for each other over hundreds of miles' distance. But it's tricky to say thank you for that sort of thing; you can send an email saying ‘thanks’, but that's a bit weak. If someone does a small favour for me and they're in the same town, my immediate instinct is to buy them a pint.
So what the world needs, I reckon, is a widely accepted Beer Voucher, along the same lines as a book token. You don't want to send someone a couple of quid in the post; that feels much more like paying for a service, more like a transaction than an expression of gratitude. But a voucher that could be redeemed for a free drink the next time someone was in their local would be a really nice thing to be able to post to people who did you a favour.
(Ideally it would be internationally accepted, but nationwide would be a good start :-) And really ideally it should be available in some sort of cryptographically secured electronic form, so if someone gave you a vital piece of information by email you could send a beer voucher in your reply. But that's probably getting too ambitious…)
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obviously i'm wierd.. but the idea of codifying a favour-reward scheme as "a pint (or equivalent [but it would seem at a pub])" seems bad to me. especially since it means going to a pub.
now if you could come up with a favour value system, you could give out favour vouchers (babysit for a night = 30 favours. hold your pint for a couple of minutes while you gesticulate = 1 favour.. that sort of thing) that would be more paletable/amusing ;) but dangerously close to money
t.
The important point to avoid a favour-voucher turning into money is that the thing it should entitle the recipient to should be obviously an expression of gratitude: something which you notice individually while consuming, and get warm fuzzy feelings about the grateful person who was so pleased with the favour you did them that they sent you the voucher. That's why money isn't what I want, because the chances are it would simply get thrown into the monthly budget, and there might very well be no specific thing the money would be spent on.
Of course, if someone is a regular drinker, beer vouchers would convert directly into money to some extent, in that money they would otherwise have spent on beer would then be available for other purposes and it wouldn't change the amount of beer they drank. But at least they could identify the specific pint that the voucher paid for, and mentally bask in someone's gratitude as they drank it.
But after all that, you know what? The whole idea of spontaneously wanting to do something nice for someone who did something nice for you is just disappearing down the plughole the longer I over-analyse it, and if I think about it for much longer I'll stop being motivated to say thank you for anything at all. I think the best thing is simply to accept that there will always be someone awkward who doesn't appreciate one's chosen means of expressing gratitude, and let them either suffer or suggest an alternative. Bah humbug.
what did you think of "pay it forward"?
and had you considered the possibly obvious extension of the internet to the point where you can reach out and warm-fuzzy someone through it? [though the warm-and-fuzzy peripheral has to be imagined to be believed]
[yes. over analysis will destroy any spontaineous(sp) action. sorry. so would implementation of the scheme impo]