As a teenager I worked at a company that rented rafts for a short trip down a river. We’d take the rafts from the customers at the end and truck them back up to the start. As they became bigger and busier, it became more important to keep track of the status of rafts and know when they were going to be getting back to the top.

They paid tens of thousands to have software made for this purpose. It sucked and was totally unable to handle the simultaneous realtime access and modification that was required.

They knew I was good with computers, so asked me if I had any ideas. In about an hour I made them a Google Sheet that worked great for the next several years until I left.