Laptops with Stickers

I like stickers from conferences but I also love my notebook clean, and if I ever do it, my brain won't let me do it wrong, I will put them well and organized. There has been some times that I saw people receive stickers and immediately put them in their notebook lid like, however their hand lands on the notebook, crooked, overlapping other stickers and I'm like "holy crap no please don't".

The thing is, once you add a sticker, it becomes visually distinguishable. If you're the teacher handing out thirty of the same exact thing for a workshop, an incoming class, whatever. We give out a notebook/laptop/piece of paper to each student. The first instruction is to write your name at the top of the page/book or otherwise somehow make it distinguishable. Because the problem is inevitably someone will lose theirs and the teacher just has this notebook with no name on it.

For laptops at work, everyone has the same IT issued laptop. You go to anything where there's more than one of you, go for a coffee break that runs long, the class does a standing exercise, whatever, the point is the laptops get mixed up. Now there are 29 indistinguishably the same laptop, and one with a sticker on it.

Guess who's getting their laptop back first?

This. My personal daily driver of a laptop has a collage on it. My work-issued laptop is a lot cleaner but it has a small red sticker declaring it to be "Editor's Choice Bestseller of the Month".

Several years ago, it was new laptop day at the startup I worked for. We didn't have an office as much as a coworking space. When people went to lunch, they just left their new MBAs on this big communal table. Some shut the lid, some didn't even lock the screen but those would've been taken care of in ~5min.

Anyway, I may or may not have switched some laptops around but the point is someone definitely did. Half an hour later people returned. Some of them were instantly confused. Some of them entered a wrong password a couple of times. Some of them were greeted by an unfamiliar Google Chrome window.

I may or may not have wasted a collective forty or so man-minutes in the span of five but I definitely enjoyed watching the confusion unfold.