As a teenager / college-aged kid, I provided "IT assistance" to family, friends, and friends of family/friends for a fee. One of my best clients was middle-age

As a teenager / college-aged kid, I provided "IT assistance" to family, friends, and friends of family/friends for a fee. One of my best clients was middle-aged mother of three - let's call her Pat, because that's close enough - whose home IT setup always needed a lot of extra love. Weird viruses on old machines, ancient printers that had to be coaxed to work well when shared over a network, "what laptop should I buy my son for college" - the usual. She was a court reporter, by trade. I had to help her with her laptop and court reporting software / hardware from time to time - it was very interesting. She had a custom "keyboard" that only had 10-15 unlabeled keys that really looked more like long and thin paddles than anything else; it worked with a program that recorded audio and tracked it to her inputs. So she could wind the report back to any given point in time, and it would highlight what she'd typed as it went. So if she needed clarification on something - she could enable audio playback that showed what she had transcribed, not unlike a karaoke machine. It was all very interesting stuff. I was a little sad when I had to tell her that I couldn't do work for her anymore, because I didn't have the time to do side work due to a developing career and social life.