My work doesn't do direct deposit, so they have to send me my paychecks via FedEx Overnight. One downside of that is that FedEx guarantees that overnight shipments will be delivered by 10:30 am — usually it's more like 9 am. But I'm not usually awake by then, so the night before I was expecting a package, I'd have to carefully lay out a set of clothes on the floor so that when the doorbell woke me up the next morning, I could leap from my bed, throw on my clothes, and answer the door before the FedEx guy gave up and left.

One day, as I struggled to sign his pad through my bleary eyes, he mentioned that if I leave a signed note on the door, he can accept that as my signature and not have to wake me up all the time. I said awesome, and since then, every 2 weeks I leave the note on the door before I go to bed, and all is good.

I didn't want to waste new sheets of paper, of course, so I just wrote the notes on the back of scrap paper. I'd try to pick the most interesting scrap I had lying around — lyrics to a traditional Irish song left over from our Costumed Olde-Tyme-Mountain-Music-Jam-Party, or instructions for building a 38 kHz infrared emitter circuit using a 555 timer chip. But I don't print things out often, so as those sorts of things ran out, I started printing out things to write my notes on the back of. A physics paper on supersymmetry. A page from the operations manual for a TransWorld Airlines Boeing 707. Driving directions from my house to an unlabelled set of coordinates in the middle of Utah. Construction notes for a railgun.

Who knows if the FedEx guy has seen them. I'm sure he's got better things to do than sit around reading the backs of the notes I leave him. But it's fun to imagine that he quickly flips the paper over each time he brings me a paycheck, to see what oddity I've prepared for him this time.