Forget High Tech

The Magic Sticky Notes Can Do

Based on a true, Corona-pandemic story.

Her mind works in sticky notes this morning.

Photo by Nathália Rosa on Unsplash

Night and day are blending with each other these weeks: emails at night, dozing off at eleven a.m.

Is this the first coffee today?

When did today start? Is it the same today as when she collapsed on the bed?

The sticky notes in her head are helping her take her bearings in this morning’s daze.

Who said it’s morning?

Facts

1. Her life is furnished with a bed, an exercise mat, a sink, a kitchen table with the laptop on it, and some other accessories to survival that are not worth listing. She hops from one to the other as on stepping stones over a mountain creek. Her life — her flat — is not much larger than that.

Context

• It used to be different. No. It only used to feel different. Because she was half of the time away on some business trip which felt as if she was commuting between Zurich, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Innsbruck and back to Paris. Her German-speaking kingdom, part of her job title. DACH. Dach means roof in German, but the roofs in her life were as fleeting as clouds in the sky. The thirty-something square metres of her Paris flat were no great difference from the hotel rooms.

She’s stirring her coffee while the kids above are running their rounds across their place, connecting bathroom to living to bedroom without a halt. And then once again from the beginning. The kids are seven and ten.

Facts

2. Now, uncountable weeks into this world reset, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that there are kids living the floor above.

Context

• The notion of neighbours used to be purely theoretical. She’d see names on other letterboxes neatly lined up at the entrance to the building. Occasionally there were people on the stairs who mumbled something as they walked past her. She’d mumble something back.

Facts

3. She hears the yells, the calls, the pleading, the wailing, the dinner table protests.

Context

• She didn’t realise how thin the walls were. Where were they all until now? Where was she? Oh yes, that explains. She used to inhabit her life like a hotel room. The others probably did the same. School, work, kiddie clubs, errands, commuting, scrolling through social media on the metro, oh life used to be so full with busyness, of places to go to. School, for one thing.

With the coffee mug in her hands she starts pacing the room from the sink to the window behind the couch and back. She knows that covers six metres. A hundred rounds makes just over half a kilometre.

4. It only takes a step from her bed to the bedroom door.

• She only realised it when she got her exercise mat delivered through Amazon and had to roll it out somewhere.

• She used to run marathons but when she moved to Paris she had to give it up. The hours were too unsteady and the flights too short-notice. The best she could do, under these new circumstances, was to order an exercise mat and sprinkle some YouTube video in-between Teams calls and Zoom meetings. From the mat she can still get a peep at the laptop to see any incoming mail.

The guys upstairs, kids and all, seem to be getting louder and louder, more restless every day. Or is it herself hearing more and more?

5. She’s Marketing Manager DACH for a brand nobody knows — not in DACH at least. In the company’s Paris office.

• She held those focus groups first thing she took on the role. To get first-hand data to build her strategy on. The senior management liked the idea. Think big, spend big. Act by the book.

• But what those focus groups told her was no good news. All the crap about education being free and any paid-for extras being downright discrimination. Their brand? May be nice, no offense. But who cares, after all?

• She had to make some decision and present slides in the strategy meeting. HER strategy. She betted on the opposite market segment than what her predecessors had done. Hoping a path not trodden may do the trick. Change of path, change of luck, so to speak.

6. She spends her entire day in front of, around, towering over, peeping at the laptop, depending on whether she’s digging through emails and trudging through telcons, or stretching out her shoulders, or doing a YouTube video (zumba/pilates/whatever) in between.

• Gone are the days of commuting and switching dachs in DACH. At first it looked as if she was going to have so much time on her hands. Needed to check in with a school? Try Teams, send an invite, just a click away. It took a few weeks to realise that everyone was sitting in front of, around, towering over, or peeping at their laptops, not just herself, and that working hours were melting into stretching breaks, online dancing classes, virtual wine-tasting, and the dichotomy week days versus weekend had lost any meaning. There was no more getting away from the devices.

7. All her marketing campaigns are paused, of course, until the great reset has settled. She now has interim missions to accomplish — deliver webinars and virtual fairs, hold hands, update the website and maintain Hubspot emailing lists.

• What was this job about, again? Right. Reshaping brand strategy, strengthening brand awareness, digging trenches into the market where Business Development could follow. Picking the low-hanging fruit, but mostly going for the hidden gems. Redefining repositioning reinforcing — all the verbs that meant that her predecessors had failed what she was to redeem.

• Moving to Paris on top of it.

• Not that Basel had been bad. Or Nurnberg before that. Or Dornbirn back in Austria. Or St. Pölten actually, where her mom and dad still lived.

• But Paris was a landmark, a trophy itself.

• Oh the glamour! Out of the marketing ranks up to the regional management tier and instantly on the plane to Paris too.

• What could be next — London?

“You’ve got to do what it takes, Lena, I just want you to be happy,” mom is saying, her old favourite slogan, but her voice slides into a bizarre whine, like door hinges that haven’t been oiled in ages. Mom’s violet-blue eyes like a Caribbean lagoon are brimming with water, trickles quickly turning into runnels. And Lena feels panic heaving from her guts as she can suddenly hear mom’s heart pounding and pounding, as if ramming her chest to burst out.

The trampling of the kids above shake her back into awareness: just the recall of a dream. Mother should be fine, after all. She’ll text her as soon as she’s had the coffee. And this brings up another sticky note, actually.

8. Her mom and dad. Their house on the outskirts of St. Pölten.

• She visits them whenever she can find a few days to catch her breath. Which, if she counts, can’t possibly be more than once a year. With this thing going on now, no chance to see them very soon again. What makes her stomach lurch is the fact that they never ask her anything. They are never disappointed when she has to leave. They never were, when she left St. Pölten, and then Austria altogether. They always smile and hug her, and tell her ata girl, do whatever it takes, just be happy. She wishes she’d deserve all that not-asking — not asking her to stay longer, to help, to look after.

She’s messed up the counting but she’s pretty sure it must be round number twenty-three and she’s managed not to trip against the foot of the couch, nor to slip on the mat yet. She must be getting better at it.

She suddenly catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror on her wardrobe door. She looks like Dumbledore in misery: some shapeless cloth in discoloured stripes is sagging on her body, her hair dissheveled, dark rings around her eyes and a sallow complexion that clearly hasn’t been getting any care lately. She’s holding the coffee mug with both her hands for fear of losing balance while doing her slalom amid the furniture.

Where were those sticky notes again? She must focus, or she’ll lose it.

Here, there was one more here.

9. There’s talk about OD, DACH being part of Europe.

• Amid the frenzy of the forced switch to virtual support, there’s been faint whispering about changes being under way, which apparently had been in the pipeline for the past half year or so. They call it OD for organisational design but it actually means layoffs, reshuffling, merging teams. Other markets in Europe have plenty of brand awareness, it must be so much fun to do marketing when people want your brand. So she can well imagine that DACH is not the senior leadership’s most precious gem. Didn’t they know this when they hired her?

All this is just for a while, the frenzy of the webinars, the calls, the helpdesk tickets, the emergency key account meetings. It’s going to be over some time soon and then she can get back to the work she was hired to do.

She opens the windows wide and leans over the sill. The best illusion of being outdoors that she can get.

She must get dressed and write herself a note of things she needs to buy. As an excuse for being in the street heading straight to the supermarket — no detours allowed. In case uniformed police (Your friend, your helper, as the saying goes) may ask for proof of a “solid reason”.

There was something about those sticky notes.

She pauses to search in her mind. Something like a whiff, like a djinn, like the ghost of an insight seems to be rising from the notes.

1. She’s an Austrian living in Paris labouring for an English brand on the German-speaking market

2. She lives in a crammed flat whose monthly rent is over a third of her salary

3. The neighbours’ private lives cannot be but overheard, day in, day out

4. Under normal circumstances, she spends her life on planes and in hotels, functioning in English and French

5. She’s locked in this place, unable to breathe, glued to a laptop that brims with bad news

6. Her marketing mission is, if she looks at the facts, at the sticky notes and takes a deep breath in: utter futility.

7. And there’s the organisational design lurking somewhere in the picture.

What is she doing here? Why is she doing all this?

How did it come to this?

For this to work, she’d need to

• tell those people that free education is just illusion. That extra options are not discrimination, but a way to develop talent.

• watch out for opportunities and hop on to a next role within the OD.

• get a decent flat where she can have a private life — and the neighbours their own

• have a private life

• be close to people she loves

• be close to people. Real people. Not faces — whether on screen or mumbling something while walking past her.

Oh and she’s forgetting that other sticky note: her mom and dad. What if they get the virus and she’s over a thousand kilometres away?

There was still another sticky note, which she’s forgetting this morning.

A small elearning publisher in a suburb of Vienna, whose HR has been trying to reach her on LinkedIn the past six weeks or so.

St. Pölten is half an hour away by train from Vienna.

Small company, small work.

How small is truly small? Just — looking at her flat: is it small as in cosy, or small as in stifling?

Stifling is the buzz word these days, in hospitals, in prevention measures. That’s what it can come to.

She won’t stifle.

She’ll no longer run this race.

Not when it can be so simple, again. Simple as in — ?

Simple as in having a life.

Find that LinkedIn message. Set up a call, priority over the wailing customer schools or the internal ops.

Call mom. Send her love.

She’ll soon be home again.

Paris has been nice.