Origin story

When I was a kid, I was an absolute nerd. (You are not surprised.) Sadly, this was before nerds were cool. I loved comic books and computers. Computers were magic! They could do amazing feats of math and stuff. They were super smart, and also shiny! Sure, I had never actually touched a computer - or even seen one up close - but I loved them anyway. I saw them in movies, TV, and books.

Computers were giant things off in secure air-conditioned rooms somewhere. They were guarded by computer priests with major beards and 2-liter bottles of Coke. I was a kid and couldn’t get into those kinds of places. I knew I loved computers because of science fiction. Incredible science fiction computers like Colossus from Colossus: the Forbin Project and HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. These computers were wonderful. Except for when they murdered humans.

And it wasn’t just computers. I loved all technology, because of other movies, like The Andromeda Strain. At the beginning of The Andromeda Strain, a super smart dude is having a dinner party. Some Army types with guns show up at his door and say “There’s a fire, sir,” and boom, it’s goodbye to the wife and off he goes to save the world. I wanted to be that person! Important and famous for being smart! Summoned to save the world! Like the Avengers, but with scientists.

Well, my life didn’t turn out that way. So far, I haven’t been called upon to save the world. Usually I get asked to edit some document, because I became a writer, a support person, a teacher, a demo-doer. I spent my whole career working with people who make things, but I’m not really a maker. And I have been lucky enough to work around amazing people who have done world-changing things. Like some of the people who invented the Mac. And the ones who created early software that worked like the web. And an incredible, mostly forgotten company that invented the smartphone 15 years too early.

I started to notice that although I wasn’t inventing any of these amazing things, I seemed to be around them a lot. And I figured out what I really am is a storyteller. I wasn’t creating the greatness. I was Adjacent to Greatness. And that’s probably when I started telling stories.