Remember When There Was Only One Type of Post-It Note?

In the beginning there was paper, and there was tape. And if you wanted to leave a note on a page of a book, you had to tape a piece of paper bearing the note, and when you removed the note it would not come off easily, but would damage the page with its stickiness.[1] And to tape the note to another page would take more tape, for the original tape would be unfit[2] to carry out its duties.

And the 3M Corporation said, “Let there be Post-it notes,” and there were Post-it notes. And the 3M Corporation saw that the Post-it notes were good, and trademarked the name “Post-it.” The Post-it notes were canary yellow, and the 3M Corporation saw that the canary yellow was good, and trademarked that, too.

And the world was filled with Post-it notes, all of the same size, and the same color. And the 3M Corporation said, “Look, the Post-it notes are all the same, and everyone buys them. Who knows how much more we can sell if the Post-it notes were different?”

And the 3M Corporation said, “Let there be Post-it notes of not only 3 inches by 3 inches, but also of 3 inches by 5 inches, and of 4 inches by 6 inches, and of 1 ½ inches by 2 inches, and of 1 3/8 inches by 1 7/8 inches.” And the 3M Corporation said, “Let there be Post-it notes of not only canary yellow®, but also of blue, and green, and orange, and pink, and of neon colors and pastel colors.” And the world was filled with Post-it notes of every size, and every color, although the 3M Corporation was unable to trademark the colors blue, green, orange, and pink.

And the 3M Corporation created Post-it notes with lines on them for people who needed to write on lines, and Post-it notes arranged in an accordian-style for people who needed to pull notes out of dispensers. And world was now filled with Post-it notes of every size and color, and every design and arrangement.

And the 3M Corporation said, “It is not good for the Post-it notes to be alone. We shall make helpmeets for them, so that they shall not be alone in the office supply storeroom, or mail room, or closet for companies that are too small or cheap to dedicate an entire room to office supplies as I have commanded. And so that we shall make a greater return for our shareholders.” And the 3M Corporation put the Post-it notes under a deep sleep, and took a piece of the patented low-stick adhesive, and formed around it Post-it tabs that could mark books of learning and pages of deposition transcripts that contained incriminating testimony so that lawyers could easily indicate which pages they wanted photocopied.

And the 3M Corporation created Post-it tabs of the same material, but that were much smaller, and some were loaded into a pen, and some were loaded into a highlighter. And the 3M Corporation created Post-it tabs that were more durable, that would not wrinkle or crease or tear with normal use. And the 3M Corporation created Post-it tabs that were narrower, and called “flags,” some with arrows, and some without arrows, and some that came in pop-up dispensers, and some that did not come in pop-up dispensers. And the 3M Corporation saw that it was good.

And the 3M Corporation said, “The low-stick adhesive is not sticky enough for some people.” And the 3M Corporation created a Post-it note with a super sticky adhesive, and called these notes “Post-it® Super Sticky Full Adhesive Notes.” And these Post-it® Super-Sticky Full Adhesive Notes were truly the stickiest notes that the world had ever seen, and did not drop off pages easily, and gave people the confidence that their notes would stay put, but which sometimes damaged the page or ink when removed, as the 3M Corporation warned on the package.

[1] Older versions had “holiness.”

[2] Others “unclean.”

Posted on 24 July 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 132

Remember When There Were No Interactive Graphics?

You may recall that about a year ago we ran a post here titled, “Remember When There Were No “TIPS” Jars?” It was a pretty terrible piece and I forgot about it almost as soon as I published it. Well, about a month ago I received an email from someone who had prepared an interactive graphic on tipping for an organization known as the Hospitality Management Schools. She had come across the tipping post, and wondered if I could take a look at the interactive graphic on tipping, and see if perhaps it would be of use to my readers.

My first thought was that I was not sure if anything posted here is of use to my readers. But after a month of procrastination, two follow up emails, and a very bad dream in which I found myself inside an interactive graphic that showed my recurring dreams by subject in high school, I finally checked out the tipping site. And if you check it out, I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: the graphic is much more valuable than the static text you find here.

What did we do before we had these nifty interactive graphics? We had to imagine the characters and figures moving. Back during the oil embargo of the early 1970s, people had to imagine the reduction in the production of oil and the corresponding increase in gas prices and pants bottoms. Back during the Plague, people had to imagine the increase in rainfall and corresponding graphic of corpses piled atop a wooden cart being pushed by Eric Idle, yelling, “Bring out yer dead!” Back during the Roman Empire, the emperors would have had to imagine a little arrow along a timeline that could be pushed with a corresponding red splotch growing all around the Mediterranean Sea.

I wish there had been an interactive graphics website when I was taking chemistry. There would have been a red stick figure for the acid and a blue stick figure for the base, and they would join hands and become salt and water and a polypropylene bottle to hold the water.

An interactive graphic would have become really handy when we were reading Hamlet in English class. The landing page would have stick figures of all the main characters—Hamlet, Ophelia, the joking friend who always comes in through the kitchen door—and clicking on each one would start an animation of their gruesome death without the effort of parsing through the lines of “What ho, Sirrah?” and “S’blood” and “Methinks this play hath much movie logik.”

If you search for interactive graphics, you are likely to find graphics on topics in economics or history or something else that isn’t going to make you the life of any party on this planet. What they need are more interactive graphics about the practical side of life. Like an interactive graphic on mowing the lawn. There would be buttons showing different sizes of lawn, and a corresponding meter showing the day in the week in which the mower of the household would start being asked if he was going to mow the lawn that weekend.

Or an interactive graphic showing the Nielsen rating of Keeping Up With the Kardashians on the X-axis, and the number of people who can place the Civil War in the correct half-century on the Y-axis. Or demonstrating how to politely take a seat in the middle of row at a crowded movie that has already started. Or on how to keep an open syrup bottle from making all the adjacent containers sticky.

But I guess tipping is as important a practical activity as there can be. Few things in life cause me more stress than how much to tip the various folks who through conscious effort make my life more pleasant. The interactive graphic dispelled every question I could ever have. In fact, I was so engrossed in the educational animation that I forgot to go out to a restaurant, get a pedicure, or have a café au lait sculpted by my town’s most celebrated barista.

Posted on 9 July 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 5

Remembering My Aunt Helen

When I was born and brought home from the hospital in a Volkswagen Bug that had no baby seat but was otherwise very reliable, my parents had no bassinet in which to place me. My father suggested the floor, which he had recently refinished and was very proud of. But Aunt Helen, my mother’s older sister and sole sibling, had a wiser suggestion. “Put him in my laundry basket,” she said. And so I was placed in the laundry basket, with perhaps a pair of socks supporting my fuzzy little head.

When I started forming words, my name for her was “Aunt Hen,” and Aunt Hen was always a part of my life. She and my Uncle Joe lived in the next town over, and it to was their house that we went for those kinds of special occasions that require chips and dip. At Christmas, there was an ornament of a man in a boot that Aunt Helen would hide in the tree, and the first of my brother and I to find it got an extra helping of candy canes. At Easter, she filled her house with jellybeans, and I would stuff my pockets as if I had discovered an ancient treasure. Whatever confusion I might have experienced as the child of an interfaith marriage, such confusion was swept away by large servings of pie.

I particularly remember the Fourth of July. We would all sit in Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe’s backyard, and when their black Labrador retriever—first Max, and then Abercrombie—came by with a tail swishing this way and that, we would all hold on to our drinks and hamburgers lest they be swept to the deck where all dogs have a right of first refusal.

Aunt Helen had a funny way of putting things. She was quick with the one-liners. Whenever we attended a Jewish funeral, Aunt Helen used to say, “Okay everybody, let’s take a bet. Meat or dairy?” And when my mother was doing Christmas shopping and needed some gift ideas for Uncle Joe, Aunt Helen famously said, “Don’t buy him any more clothes. He wears the same shit every day.”

Yes, Aunt Helen’s defining trait was her sense of humor. When my mother was in middle school, Aunt Helen helped her study for an exam in American history that was going to test the various acts—the Navigation Acts, the Molasses Act, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act—that led to America declaring that it had a right to pass its own oppressive acts. My mother was wearing ski pajamas during this study session, so Aunt Helen asked, “And when was the Ski Pajama Act enacted?” Decades later, when yours truly was studying those same acts, my mother would ask me about the Ski Pajama Act, even though I had never heard of ski pajamas.

Aunt Helen was at her funniest when talking about the family. She knew all the family gossip. If this cousin wasn’t talking to that cousin, Aunt Helen always knew the gory details and we would all gather ‘round her like our ancestors once gathered around storytellers in the days before the E! channel.

Just because she was funny, however, did not mean Aunt Helen was a pushover. She taught elementary school, and even outside the classroom there were still only two ways of doing things: her way, and her way without being told. She liked to moderate the speed at which my Uncle Joe drove the car, saying, through clenched teeth, “SLOW…DOWN…JOE.” Averaging about 35 m.p.h. on the Long Island Expressway, we knew we had to tell them to be places 3 hours ahead of time.

But they always made it. Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe went to everything.

Even after diabetes confined her to a wheelchair, Aunt Helen was determined to attend every major event in everyone’s life, no matter how much she had to travel in a van or yell at my uncle. She went to my college graduation. She went to my law school graduation. Even the morning of my wedding, in a hotel some 300 miles from her home in eastern Long Island, she passed out and had to be revived. I knew nothing of this until months later, for at my wedding she was dressed up, and alert, and happy.

When she went on dialysis, I was worried that she wouldn’t be as funny as she had been. But the moment I saw her those worries went away. She didn’t talk about her illness at all, and instead would talk about the latest politician to momentarily forget about the existence of video cameras. Of all the limitations her illness placed on her, it did not touch her mind, her voice, or her personality. She was at all times—healthy, sick, standing, seated, lying in a hospital bed—a mixture of unconditional love and sharp wit. She never let anything get in the way of seeing her family and friends. And she never let anything get in the way of a laugh.

I remember visiting her in the hospital after she had both legs amputated. She was sitting up in bed and asking me about how I was enjoying work. When I told her about how the hours were long and that the partners were driving me crazy, she said to me, “Well, don’t let it get to you too much. Make sure you have fun, too.” And then she sent Uncle Joe and I out for some food in blatant violation of hospital rules.

Three weeks before my wedding anniversary this past May, my wife and I received a card from Aunt Helen, congratulating us on making it through yet another year without killing each other. She was always very thoughtful like that, and I laughed at the time because I figured that she had just forgotten the exact date of our anniversary. Why else would she be sending me a card that early? I made a mental note to call her.

As it turned out, a few days later it was my Uncle Joe who was calling me, to tell me that Aunt Helen had passed away the night before. My first thought was that I should have called her. I guess I was too busy downloading the latest version of iTunes to find 10 minutes to talk to my aunt. The guilt was terrible and I didn’t feel like eating that day.

But then I thought about what Aunt Helen would say. “Don’t worry about me. Enjoy yourself. And eat.” And I smiled, and knew that Aunt Hen would never really leave me. And then I went and got a sandwich.

Posted on 4 July 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 25