The left-hand margin of the topmost piece of paper on the desk is not a persistent storage medium. In two days’ time you will have lost the vital phone number / password you scribbled there. Nor will you remember whose it was; only that it was vital and is now overdue.
PS memos to self about persistent storage written on the nearest handy piece of paper are not themselves persistently stored, either.
My non-persistent storage medium of choice is the envelope of the unopened credit-card bill. This has the additional feature of preserving ignorance of the debt since to open the envelope might entail ripping some obviously vital word or sequence of numbers.
Try the ‘memo’ function on your cellphone. Works for me every time.
But you can’t write on a cellphone; and most of the things I write down are hard to dictate, like urls and numbers. Also, I would have to find the cellphone.
Weeeell now.
The best persistent storage to hand would be one that couldn’t be lost or destroyed because it was never there in the first place. Furthermore, the best of anything obviously requires massive technological overkill.
So I propose a very cheap, ubiquitous ultrawideband wireless radar system, one unit per room, car, phone or whatever, that detects the movements you make when you pretend to write on the palm of one hand with an invisible pen in the other. It can relay this by wireless to a server which will decode the movements and carefully file the date and location stamped message away — in context (ie, immediately after a phone call from Fred, in the middle of Jerry Springer, after a very long and boozy lunch with a mad historian) — for retrieval on command.
The system could also work out where the nearest display to you is, and display the note there as you write it. If no display is available, it will command some nearby speaker to read it out. If you’re out of range of screens and speakers – if you’re taking part in a naturist ramble across Dartmoor, for example – then sorry soldier, you’re SOL.
Alternatively, hire a secretary.
R