I was diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder) as a child; I think today all of these are classified as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). A pair of my mentors in high school (perhaps it was Junior High, my family was military and we moved quite a bit), Rich Phillips and Hunter Matheson, noticed that I’d often take a conversation to places that were only thinly related to the existing conversational thread, sometimes he could see why I veered off in a certain direction, and sometimes only I could follow the connections.

It was really more of a loving jab as many nicknames are, not meant to cause harm, more of an inside joke with them and myself. They also used it as a bit of a code word when in the company of someone who didn’t know how I operate, “*cough* TANGENT *cough*”, as a prompt to watch my conversational threads.

I do want to thank you two for taking time out of your day several times a week to help me process things and to talk shop. Go figure that a kid with a special interest in computers would take a liking to a pair of network engineers huh?

Kacey Green
This post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.​