Post-it™ Notes: What They Really Are

 

I've had it. I'm at breaking point. Why do people continually insist on a Post-it™ as the only medium for taking a quick note? Why anyone would consider such lurid™ and pathetically small squares of paper™ to be suitable as a vessel for anything - coffee cup and externalised moment of epiphanic thought alike - I just don't know.


Look, if you're Einstein and you've just come up with your theory of relativity and the only nearby fibrous and two-dimensional object suitable for channeling your intellect into the real world is a Post-it™ stack then by all means go for it: quantify and explain all of time and space on a single Post-it™. (As long as it's not a pink one™: it's perfectly acceptable to blind the world with your genius, but Post-it™ colour is an entirely different matter.)


You're Einstein. You're pretty smart. Explaining all of time and space on a single Post-it™ is all very well and good, but I'd gladly bet all the stationery in my house that you can't explain the relevance of a certain aforementioned vivid abomination™ in our universe.


Note taking, to-do lists and scribbled calculations are all great things to use a piece of paper for, but when anything is written on a Post-it™ it seems to lose all meaning; overpowered by a field of undiluted fashion fad™ that emanates from the ghastly core™ of matter: brighter than a thousand suns™, and more dense too.


Writing on a Post-it™ condones extreme brevity. Unless you're the sort of person who wears a monocle and writes with a pen that has a nib manufactured from a single strand of spider silk, they're just not suited to sentence writing. Skipping punctuation, using bullet points, condensing complicated thoughts into a single word followed by etc™, et cetera: people nowadays will jump at any opportunity to save time and increase productivity, even if it means the death of language™:


Ah well, no sad loss. Better schedule a meeting etc next week just in case.


Why is it that a product which is meant to be all about increasing productivity does exactly the opposite. I shudder to think of how many work-hours have been wasted in schools and workplaces by people contorting their hands and cricking their necks as they lean over those dreaded plinths™ and attempt to inscribe™. Unless you're nearing the end of a block - and I'm astonished if you are - to avoid covering up the writing surface you somehow have to hover your hand above the paper and then chase it round the table with pen strokes. Even the most gifted writer with flawlessly flowing copperplate will be forced to sacrifice joined up writing™ and go back to finger spaces™.


Trying to write something on a Post-it™ note is so infuriating that, even if I had attempted it in the first place, I'd soon give up and buy a proper notepad™ instead.


There are so many better alternatives out there. Alternatives that don't fall off the edge of a computer monitor at the merest suggestion of sticking them there; that you can look at directly without eye protection and that, most importantly, you can carry around to your hearts content without ever being introduced to strangers as Joseph and His Technicolour Post-it notes™.


If you really don’t want to waste your money™ just get a scrap of paper™ and stick it up with a piece of sellotape™.