By Justin Fahmie · September 2026
An imagined workbench spanning different stages of the business, not an inventory of Justin’s actual equipment or surroundings.
There’s a post from 2007 where I tell a computer forum that I run a PC repair business and then explain that my own PC has developed a problem I can’t figure out.
That feels like a fairly honest company brochure.
Windows XP was doing the kind of thing that makes a technician start doubting the basic agreement between a button and an action. Programs wouldn’t launch. Parts of the interface stopped responding. The machine was producing plenty of symptoms and being less generous with explanations.
I’d tried things. I was asking what to try next. I wanted to understand the failure instead of simply making it disappear with a reinstall. Nearly twenty years later, that last part sounds familiar enough to be a little embarrassing. Apparently I have been myself for quite a while.
The post is also useful evidence of something less dramatic: by then, I was already doing computer repair as a business. There wasn’t a future entrepreneur in the thread describing his vision. There was a working technician with a troublesome computer and a question.
The earlier trail is scattered across websites and forum discussions. By 2004 and 2005, there were online stores under KCSales, including allgardenfurniture.com and time4neon.com, built around osCommerce. That history contains a lot of practical work behind the tidy phrase “online store.” Product information, images, hosting, catalogs, checkout. All the parts that have to agree before the customer can do the apparently simple thing at the end.
A website can look finished while some essential part is still being an asshole.
I learned the work by getting into the work. The surviving record shows projects and questions accumulating. A business-directory record places KC Computer Services’ start in 2005. That’s one milestone in the trail; it isn’t a reason to pretend every stage happened on one official morning. Making things, trying things, repairing things, and becoming responsible for things can overlap for a long time before hindsight straightens them into a timeline.
By 2009, there’s a client-server troubleshooting discussion. By 2011, I’m asking about using a tablet for client agreements. Different problem, same habit: there’s a process here, it’s awkward, can technology make it work better?
I particularly like that agreements are part of the history. They’re a useful correction to the romantic version of a technology business, where you apparently spend all day making interesting machines do interesting things. Somebody still needs to understand what work is being done. The information needs to be recorded. The practical relationship between the people matters as much as the equipment.
Eventually, a lot of the job becomes responsibility for what happens after the exciting part.
Does it still work? Can the person use it? Is there a way back if it fails? Have I explained the result in words that help? A clever fix that leaves somebody confused has left part of the problem sitting on their desk.
The equipment has expanded over the years. Computers, networks, Wi-Fi, cameras, phone systems, backups, software. There’s more to learn, and there’s always some new variation on an old inconvenience. Running a business means deciding which of those things needs attention now and leaving enough information that the next visit to the problem doesn’t begin from nothing.
I was also sick through these years. The work didn’t happen in a separate, unlimited-energy version of my life. That helped make wasted effort something I cared about reducing. If a better process could remove an unnecessary step, there was a practical reason to build it.
Looking backward, I can see the continuity more easily than a single beginning. Websites became stores. Technical interest became work people relied on. Questions became experience, and experience became responsibility for helping somebody else through the next problem.
The old records are an oddly good way to remember the beginning. They show what needed doing, what I was trying, and where I had to ask for help. They also preserve my public admission that my own computer was currently winning.
Apparently I was starting a business.
I was definitely still troubleshooting.
Source and edition note
Based on Still Building, chapters 5–7, and its historical trail. The 2007 post was read directly on September 10, 2026. The storefront page returned 403; 2004–05 stores, the directory’s 2005 start date, and 2009/2011 milestones retain the memoir’s source status. Directory start and legal formation are not treated as identical.
Written with AI assistance in Justin’s requested voice from his shared history and the original Still Building memoir. Reflective prose is a reconstruction, not a verbatim interview. The illustration is an artistic interpretation; people, objects, rooms, and settings are not exact documentary depictions.