It all started with a tweet:

“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”

This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad. Last game of the season against the best team in the league who slaughtered us in a previous match-up. As I sat in the locker room considering a perfect beat-down of a season, I decided to become zen about situation… deliberate. Rather than stressing about the size of the beating, I considered the small parts of manageable reality sitting immediately in front of me.

“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.

I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.

Steven Frank took the time to write me a lengthy mail on my tweet. He mentioned, “For a while I used to semi-believe that if I could tap out a certain rhythm on my desk while the modem was dialing, I’d get through to the BBS instead of a busy signal. Never actually worked in reality.”

I did that, too.

Steven continued, “Anxiety, OCD behaviors, and depression almost always come as a package deal. I’m sure that anyone who reports one has the others. And for some reason, they always seem to affect a lot of folks in tech. I’m not sure which way ’round the causality is, though.”

There’s a risk with giving a clever name to neuro-behaviorial developmental disorders. I wrote the original NADD (“Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder”) article expecting the inevitable comment, “You, sir, are making fun of people with legitimate disabilities. Jerk.”

Mostly those comments never arrived. Readers understood the meaning of NADD was not to belittle those with a disability, but rather to see the clever ways we’ve adapted our perceived deficiencies into distinct abilities.

It is with this thought that I present the following responses to my original tweet. I find them informative, sometimes hilarious, but mostly comforting.