I’ve finally dis­cov­ered the name of the dis­ease that has been affect­ing my day to day life for years. There’s good news, I’m not alone. The bad news, as of now, there is no cure. It’s called Nerd Atten­tion Defi­ciency Dis­or­der (NADD).

For the offi­cial diag­no­sis, read the white papers. Skip the first three para­graphs, they’re not important.

• N.A.D.D.

Okay, here’s the first test:

Stop read­ing right now and take a look at your desk­top. How many things are you doing right now in addi­tion to read­ing this column?

Uh oh. Um, okay, here we go:

1. Safari browser window with at least 5 tabs. These are open to the same sites that I always have open.
2. Second Safari window with blog arti­cles I’m cur­rently read­ing. (The tabs on the first window started overflowing)
3. Third Safari window full of links to Ruby sites.
4. NetNewsWire.
5. Ter­mi­nal window.
6. PDF ver­sion of Pro­gram­ming Ruby.
7. Sev­eral Text­mate win­dows. (Cur­rent blog posts, and sev­eral Ruby programs).
8. iTunes.
9. The Filter.
10. Entourage.
11. Apple Remote Desktop.
12. Work­Group Manager.
13. Oh yeah, this post.

I’m start­ing to see a prob­lem here. Moving on.

My mother first diag­nosed me with NADD. It was the late 80s and she was bring­ing me dinner in my bed­room (nerd). I was mer­rily typing away to friends in some prim­i­tive chat room on my IBM XT (super nerd), lis­ten­ing to some music (prob­a­bly Flock of Seag­ulls — nerd++), and watch­ing Back to the Future with the sound off (neeeeer­rrrrrrd). She com­mented, “How can you focus on any­thing with all this stuff going on?” I responded, “Mom, I can’t focus with­out all this noise.”

I can’t claim these spe­cific nerdi­ties, but I did def­i­nitely as a teenager rig up two TV’s in my room so that I could watch TV while I was lev­el­ing up my Final Fan­tasy party or prac­tic­ing Tony Hawk so that I could later kick my friends butts.

The pres­ence of NADD in your friends is equally detectable. Here’s a simple test. Ask to sit down at THEIR com­puter and start muck­ing with stuff on their desk­top. Move an icon here… adjust a window size there. If your friend calmly watches as you tinker away, they’re prob­a­bly NADD-​free, for now. How­ever, if your friend is anx­iously rub­bing their fore­head and/or climb­ing out of their skin when you move that icon 12 PIXELS TO THE RIGHT, there’s NADD in the house. BACK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.

I’m think­ing of you right now Bri. I think I will move your win­dows around while you’re at lunch. I won’t tell you, but you’ll know I did it imme­di­ately when you sit down at your computer.

NADD can advance your career… if you’re in the right career. Ever worked at a start-​up? Ever shipped soft­ware? What are the last few weeks like? We call it the fire drill because every­one is run­ning around like crazy people doing random, unex­pected shit. NADD is the per­fect dis­ease for man­ag­ing this sit­u­a­tion. It devel­ops the skills to sift through the colos­sal amount of use­less noise and hear what’s relevant.

Yeah, I def­i­nitely make a living in com­puter sup­port. On a daily basis, random people find it okay to dump their tech­no­log­i­cal woes along with all of their life’s stresses on me in hopes that I will be able to fix their prob­lem. It’s up to me to sift through the junk and try to find a solution…in a very short amount of time. ‘Nuff said.

I wonder if there is a sup­port group.