raleighnet.org

I keep a yellow legal pad on my desk at work for taking notes and the like. Somebody will call me, or I’ll call them or whatever, and I’ll carve out a little corner of space on the page. Frequently I’ll write down the callers name or where they’ll calling from because if I didn’t, I’d forget it instantly and because if I didn’t, I’d never be able to figure out which cryptic zen minimalist note or reminder to myself went with which person (often I can’t figure it out again anyway).

Sometimes I’m writing sideways or at an angle whatever I need to do to make the best use of the page, filling it with the most random string of words imaginable. Some times the page becomes dense with these notes. sometimes I’ll jump forward a page even though the previous page is only half full because I’m expecting I’ll have to take a lot of notes, and I want a clean space to work with. Within a day, two at the outside, these notes are already well on their way to being impossible to decipher. This legal pad is for short-term not long term memory.

Occasionally though, I will need to refer back to one of the notes I took. I’ll flip back, and when somebody calls again, likely as not I’ll just start taking notes on that previous page. So, as that page fills up, as they all inevitably do, I’ll flip forward expecting to find a brand new, pristine yellow page waiting for me. It’s always a shock when I find some of my notes on this new page. Notes by the way that I only half remember taking and that I can only just decipher:

www
zapdata.com
on-line
10¢ 1,000

It’s like some kind of bizarre note from myself in the future. A stocktrade that will set me up for life perhaps? In this case, it was fresh enough that did remember what it meant, and I could easily have dispensed with at least half of those lines and not lost the meaning. But, when I’m talking with a sales person (which I try not to do very much), I sometimes have to distract myself from the voices in my head telling me to Kill, Kill, Kill…