BETWEEN THE LINES: KEEPING UP WITH THE PAPER TRAIL IS A NEVERENDING, TIRESOME JOB

No matter how hard I try to pick them up, there are always pieces of scrap paper lying about my house or desk.

Forget the Information Age, e-mail or the Internet, an age-old invention still has control of my life. Paper. It doesn't matter what form, size or color it comes in -- paper seems to reign as my choice for jotting notes and reminders.

While trying to decide which millennium edition newspapers I wanted to keep and which I wanted to recycle last week, I had a sudden realization: Paper is everywhere at my house. Such a fact shouldn't be a shock to someone who gets two newspapers delivered to her home daily, but it was for me.

It's not just the stacks of newspapers that collect in baskets or on my floor that bother me. I don't necessarily like knowing that I can't keep up with the scraps of paper lying about my house and desk.

No matter how hard I try to pick them up, there is always a piece of scrap paper on the coffee table or next to the telephone at home. Sometimes the paper has a phone number scrawled hurriedly, but to whom it belongs I can't remember. That really doesn't matter because when I do remember the person's name, I won't be able to find the piece of paper. That's just a fact of life, sort of like Murphy's Law.

Even if I do tack them up on the refrigerator or file them away, the scraps of paper seem to multiply over time. Things only get worse after I get the day's mail. It isn't the junk mail that fills my box but computer catalogs or credit card offers for people who used to live at my address. Most of the "or current resident" stuff gets tossed in the trash. The rest I politely return to the post office, but even for just a day or two, they add to the paper clutter in my house.

Things got so bad for a while that I bought a basket just to hold my mail. At the time I thought I'd be able to keep better track of bills due and such, but now the system seems useless. The basket just collects junk mail and catalogs.

Regardless of how technologically advanced our society becomes, I'll still be the holdout with the stack of yellow Post-It notes and stacks of scrap paper in hand.

At work I'm just as bad.

I jot phone messages on any available scrap of paper, only to forget what the message was about. My computer is outlined in yellow sticky notes with Internet and e-mail addresses, telephone numbers or notes about who to call for an interview and story.

I tried to clear them off, but unless the notes are stuck to my computer I'll never see them. And that means I'll forget something important. Probably the hardest part of changing office computers in the Y2K update was taking all my Post-it notes down from the old machine and tacking them up on the new one. I'm sure I could invest in some sort of computerized Post-it note program, but for what?

Regardless of the technological advances, I'll just stick with what I know best. A paper and pencil still do the trick for jotting notes and messages. Now if I could just find my pencil AND a piece of paper, I'd be doing great.

Laura Johnston is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.