Joys Of Modern Life

WHAT ON earth did people do before they had Post-It Notes?

It's like trying to imagine what life was like without disposable nappies, penicillin or electric light. Migrating from office to home, via the white- collar crime of stationery-cupboard larceny, those lemon-yellow squares with one sticky side have become so indispensable to modern life that to imagine an existence without them is to be pitched into ontological crisis.

The first shining virtue of the Post-It Note is that it acts as a buffer between our fragile sense of order and the messy reality of everyday life. Can't find your Filofax? Never read the manual to your Psion? Never mind. Just write yourself a Post-It Note and stick it somewhere you're going to see it. Magically, the Post-It opens out a cool, neutral space between the twin poles of organisation and of chaos that govern our lives.

No accident, then, that it was so successfully launched in the Eighties, the decade when life mutated out of what it had been for most of the post- war period - a steady round of work and leisure - and into a continuous and escalating study in stress management. Just as we were all about to be deluged by a torrent of phone messages, new fax numbers, changes of address, shopping lists, instructions to/from spouse/nanny/milkman, the Post-It Note plugged the hole in the dyke. It is, if you like, the graphic equivalent of our poor brains' overloaded short-term memory - a portable means of storing, temporarily but reliably, information that can later be recorded and filed properly or simply discarded.

And the Post-It is available - sorry to sound like a promo for the 3M Corporation - in 34 colours, 27 sizes and 56 shapes. So whether you stick to that ubiquitous yellow, or plump for orange, blue or mauve, there is no reason why your micro-memo should not also be an aesthetically pleasing experience.

Inevitably, there is now an artist who works with Post-It Notes: Melynda Gierard used 60,000 in her 1998 work, The Sampler.

I've only seen it on the Web, but The Sampler just looks, well, like a wall covered in yellow paper scales. I don't think she has a problem with sponsorship, though.

Actually, I prefer the frankly philistine, late-Eighties attitude of the employees at a firm of City accountants. Not impressed by the boardroom's policy of collecting contemporary art, they used the abstract paintings as notice boards and stuck Post-It Notes all over them.

But its own contemporaneity is the great beauty of the Post-It Note. For a product that came into existence by accident and failure - when its lateral-thinking inventor, Art Fry, found a use for some not-very- adhesive adhesive - the Post-It has established a remarkable and instant rapport with the spirit of the age. Think about it: post-fordism, post- feminism, post-modernism, Post-It.

If the Biro, with its functional purity and ease of mass production, was the great gift of modernism to the office environment, then the Post- It Note is post-modernism's gift to the office.

And this brings me to what I love most about the Post-It Note - its McLuhan- esque capacity to signify itself. Let me elaborate. You are sick of answering your colleague's phone and leaving messages on scraps of paper, whose receipt you subsequently overhear being vehemently denied when the unrequited caller rings back. Solution: write the message on a Post-It Note - name, number and instruction to "please call back" - and leave the Post-It stuck dead-square centre of said colleague's computer screen. Deniability denied.

There it is, magnificently passive-aggressive in its reproachful yellow (or orange, blue or mauve) livery, its message nine-tenths submerged, like an iceberg but just as deadly. Decoded, it means: "Don't you dare claim you didn't get this... and shame on you for not returning calls!"

No matter what you may scribble on the Post-It Note, the medium is the message.