That's pretty much how it happened. A neighbour bought a medical practice from two retiring doctors in their 80s. One had officially diagnosed vascular dementia but was still practicing. The place was losing money because they couldn't reliably bill appointments. Nobody really knew how to use computers except for that neighbour who was himself busy seeing patients. That neighbour knew I was interested in "computers" because I picked up some old desktop he put out on the side of the road for rubbish collection, and asked if I was up for scanning papers in for hourly cash. "Ummm, sure". I never knew I could really make money using computers.

Every couple of days "the server" would crash. It was an old dusty Windows box under one of the admin staff's desk. I offered to move it out so they wouldn't keep accidentally kicking out the power cable or disturb the wobbly ethernet switch making it fall down off the top of it down into the corner where the mice and moths hid. I was sick of crawling down there after a while.

Once staff saw that I knew how to plug network cables back in after moving IT gear, they stopped calling in the IT company meant to be keeping all this stuff on life support. From there you hear about every tiny little problem, you get busier, learn to automate bits of your job piece by piece to keep up with the demands.

For example, a doctor complained about waiting for me to scan in pathology reports delivered by snail mail. The fax machine kept running out of toner & paper as it was also the practice's main printer. I researched and found that the pathology providers could install some software on a Windows machine which would deliver reports directly into the medical software the doctors were starting to use. That software would crash, too. How can I monitor that Windows service and have it send me an email if it goes down? What if I could get it to try to start it back up again before it sent me an email?

Eventually the dementia doctor retired as he kept falling asleep during appointments.

The other old doctor voluntarily quit when the filing cabinets containing all the paper records moved to a locked room with just a scanner and shredder.

A doctor wanted to be able to connect to the practice remotely. I learned about VPNs, but I had no idea if I could set that up using the modem/router provided by the ISP. Some family friend referred me to the IT company who took care of their email. Turned out that company were real Linux purists running all their own mail system in a datacenter. They were impressed by my proposed network diagram for the medical practice. They thought it was cool that I installed Linux on old PCs to keep using them for fun.

Instead of me hiring them for support, they just offered me a real salary job at a bit over minimum wage.