Post-It Delivery

When we told our friends at Coca-Cola that we’d been playing with sticky notes, they were kind enough to introduce us to the folks at 3M. It was quite a call, with the two of us on the phone with Coca-Cola and 3M talking about all the different glues and coatings on Post-its and what might work for us best.

3M offered to send us some Post-its to play with, which was fantastic. We thought about what would be a good number of pads to get us started and worked up our courage to ask for 4,000 pads.

I’d forgotten about it when, two weeks later, a tractor trailer truck pulled up in front of my house out in the woods of Buckfield, Maine. What did he have? 46,000 pads. 4.6 million individual notes. Over two tons of Post-its. It was the driver’s last delivery of the day, on his last day on the job before retiring. So there I am, in my pajamas, moving two tons of Post-its onto my front porch with the 65 year old delivery guy. I didn’t even have a place to put them inside.

The next day, in typical Buckfield fashion, all our friends came over to help move them up into the EepyLabs, where they made quite an impressive pile of boxes. We had the feeling that some mistake had been made and all the Post-its bound for every OfficeMax in New England had been sent to us by mistake.

Over the next few months, we learned how great it was to have such a big supply, since individual experiments could use hundreds of pads. And who knew that the final experiment would use over a quarter of a million sticky notes!