Like a cold. Sometimes people call an illness a condition. A condition that can happen to you.

We have frameworks essentially living in a completely synchronous world--like a 2D plane--and they can't tell that there is another dimension out there except for when something inserts itself into its view out of nowhere. The protocol that we arrive at to deal with async is convoluted, because it is a state that is basically inflicted on the framework. That's what we sought to remedy.