The media goes on and on about the epidemic of ADD amongst the nation’s children, and they like to get all doom and gloom about our future while doctors are throwing prescriptions at kids like dollar bills at a cheap stripper.

Bullshit, I say. Children are the cause of ADD in adults.

This stunning and completely scientific realization came to me this morning as a woke up and fired up the laptop to telecommute for the morning. The first thing my addled brain noticed was that A) the child was blessedly still asleep, and B) that I was dodging assorted plastic flotsam that she’d left lying about the house, debris in the shape of ponies and batmen and laptops and LEGO bricks and what have you.

The second key to this puzzle came a little while later when she did wake up and came rushing into my office. She spun in circles in her giraffe pajamas like some sort of shrieking pink tornado, tossing more ponies and batmen and LEGO bricks everywhere. In minutes my office (which is not spotless by any standard but is normally slightly organized) was covered in toys. Meanwhile, she had noticed that spinning in circles made the room spin when she stopped… which of course caused her to start repeating the cycle.

So suddenly I was on my laptop doing work, keeping half an eye on my desktop as well for assorted news updates (and I recognize that that’s a bad start), but then I’m also simultaneously trying to corral the aforementioned three and a half year old cyclone and prevent it from hurting itself by, say, spinning around and tripping on a pony and faceplanting on one of the cats which have five sharp ends.

“Ok, no, the customer needs to try this WAIT Zoe don’t step on that be careful! oh hey info on that new BMW DON’T PICK UP THE CAT the server isn’t down, the alert is wrong, wow egypt is having riots? I wonder what happened to no, wait, Zoe please take all your ponies into the other room, no you don’t need me for this conference call, how about… yeah, ok, Zoe, why is there a parade of ponies in front of my office door?”

I’m somewhat surprised to find that it’s after 4 in fact. Things accomplished today? I don’t know if the customer actually tried what I recommended and I vaguely recall being on that conference call, I found out how much the new BMW 1M weighs and not much else, I know there was rioting in Egypt but not why, but at least the parade of ponies is gone and the cat isn’t traumatized.

Some company is going to invent over the counter chewable Ritalin for grownups and they’re going to make trillions.