Comment OP here. Most of the people who were my clients were artist types who moved to the public transportation fringes of Brooklyn where rent was the cheapest

Comment OP here. Most of the people who were my clients were artist types who moved to the public transportation fringes of Brooklyn where rent was the cheapest (at that time). They were barely skating by and usually had pretty roachy apartments. A large percentage of these folks were very into drug use... in a way that it hindered achieving the goals that they moved to NY to accomplish. I took on these clients specifically because my store was going to fleece them and not fix their problems whereas I could and reasonably quickly. As broke creatives with broken computers their lives were likely to spiral into a dark place otherwise. I dealt with way more desperate situations than middle-class people with regular computer problems. This was the "I pirated Adobe Creative Suite and have a deadline but the virus has taken over my computer" era.