The thing that shook the ground under me was an inventory count.

The hospital had been open for more than twenty years, and in all that time it had never done a proper inventory. No one had a real list of what the building actually held — how many of each thing, sitting where. When you’re small, you get away with that. When you grow, you don’t. If you don’t know what you have and where, things quietly leak away. So the facilities team finally decided to do the first full count.

Here’s the strange part: I already knew how to do this.

A skill from another life

My path into this work is a little odd. Before I came back to being a physical therapist, I spent about two years at a research institute. While I was there, I ran the entire institute’s inventory count by myself. So I knew, in my body, how much labor it takes and how long it drags on.

Counting the objects is the easy part. The real work comes after. You group similar things together. You give every single item its own unique code. Then you organize everything around those codes, so it can actually be found again later. Skip that design step and all your counting just becomes a pile of numbers nobody can search.

That design was the job. When the facilities team asked for help, the roles split naturally. I’d build a form and send it down. Each department would survey their own shelves and drawers and fill it in. Then I’d attach codes, gather it all in one place, and turn it into something anyone — managers, related departments — could search whenever they needed. I called the tool EasyFS.

At first it ran beautifully.

Then the data piled up

Supplies turned out to be far more numerous than I’d guessed. Every department, every room, every drawer was packed with them. The count climbed into the hundreds of thousands.

And the more it climbed, the more visibly the tool slowed down. One search, and the screen would freeze for a long, awkward moment. The thing I’d built so people could find supplies fast was now making them wait.

It frustrated me, and worse, I couldn’t tell why it was slow. At that point I knew nothing about what happens inside a program. I didn’t even have the concept of “structure” in my head. I just assumed there had to be some faster way to build it, somewhere out there.

So I asked Gemini. Why is this so slow? How do I make it fast?

The answer became my first thread to pull. My tool was running on Apps Script — Google’s scripting layer — which routes through Google’s own servers. Going out to a distant server and back, every time, was always going to be slow.

One sentence that wouldn’t sit still

That single fact rolled around in my head in a funny way.

It’s slow because it goes through Google’s servers. So… if I ran it on our own server, wouldn’t it be fast?

Writing it now, it sounds obvious. Back then I didn’t even know what a server was. All I had was a vague hunch that “ours” would be faster. So I sat down and asked myself a plain question: what servers do I actually know about?

The EMR server came to mind first — the system that holds the hospital’s medical records. But that was off-limits. It holds patient data and it’s wired tightly to outside agencies, the national insurance bodies and the rest. It is not a thing someone like me gets to poke at. One wrong move and the hospital stops.

Then something completely different surfaced.

The NAS.

That shared storage box — a NAS, the little network drive in the office where staff dump photos and documents to share. Everyone connects to it and uses it together. So, when you think about it… isn’t that kind of a server too? And if it is, couldn’t I put my program on it?

I had no confidence. I didn’t even know whether it was a possible thing or an impossible thing. But a question, once it lands, never quite leaves — and the most useful move a beginner can make is to take a vague hunch seriously enough to test it, before you’re sure it’s allowed.

So I decided to move EasyFS onto that NAS.

What this really was

Looking back, that was the moment I stepped off the toy setups.

I didn’t learn it from a course. I reasoned my way there from one offhand sentence an AI gave me, plus the only servers I happened to know existed. That’s it. No background, no permission, no plan — just a slow tool and a question I couldn’t drop.

The hunch turned out to be right, but the road there was longer and stranger than I expected. Moving a program onto a box meant for storing photos opened up a whole set of problems I didn’t know existed yet. That’s the next story.