An Oral History of TND Part 1
In the beginning
We’ve been pretty quiet lately for a number of reasons, some of which I’ve discussed before and others I think may be at play and will plan to discuss in this string of posts, however long it winds up being.
In some ways, TND has been inevitable since I discovered the joy of napping in my youth, though more proximately, the story of TND begins during the COVID-19 lockdown. Going into lockdown, I’d been spending a lot of time commuting and traveling for business, so suffice to say that I suddenly found myself with a lot more time in my day. I put this newfound time into a few things, including work, exercise, for a time, and napping, like so many people across the country.1
In the meantime, my friends (the best guys in the world) and I really leaned into technology to stay in touch during lockdown,2 which was great for me, as a hardcore extrovert. Through our WhatsApp chats, I learned that Hen independently had reengaged with his love of napping, and rather than go the Newton/Leibniz route, we decided to celebrate our love of napping by way of the TAENR, which, I believe, began as “Nap Time” in WhatsApp and over time evolved into the TAENR in Signal.
The Wife leaned into exercise and baking banana bread, though she’d been doing that long since before lockdown.
We’d had a group text going off and on over the years but primarily stayed in touch via email because we could never get everyone on a single thread (some of us used Android, others iPhones, which apparently used to cap (and possibly still caps) the number of people in a given chat to 10). At some point (pre-lockdown, I think), we moved to WhatsApp, which is where we communicated until Grizz convinced us to switch to Signal after the great Facebook/WhatsApp outage of 2021.