I became a programmer by accident. I was just tired of working for $8.33/hr. I was working in a grocery warehouse, 2pm to 2am, 6 days a week for $30k/yr.
I saw one of the admins using "macros" in a spreadsheet program to do stuff, and thought I might be able to do that. I went to a staffing firm the next day, took a test on some software called Microsoft Office, and passed with flying colors (I had never seen it before). I got a job checking budgeting spreadsheets (making $10/hr) to make sure they were actually calculating the relevant totals and not simply filling them in. I found the "record macro" button and started teaching myself VBA.
4 months later, I had my first programming job.