What's the most expensive thing in the car?
Not the car. The sticky note on the dash.
Something like "water stain in the hallway." The agent saw it, wrote it down, and the note did its job for exactly as long as it stayed in his hand.
Where does the note go?
Where notes go. The console, a jacket pocket, the bottom of a bag, the back of a folder that gets closed and set down somewhere.
Then the disclosure needs writing, and the honest version of what happens next is that the agent goes looking. Sometimes the note turns up. Sometimes the memory holds. Sometimes neither, and the form gets written from whatever they can still picture.
That's the expensive part. Not the note. What's missing from the form because the note didn't make it back.
Why does this keep happening?
Because the moment you notice something and the moment you have to record it officially are separated by everything that happens in between, and nothing connects them.
The observation is at its best right when it happens. Standing in the hallway looking at the stain, you know exactly where it is, how big it is, what it sat under. From that moment on, the record only gets thinner. A sticky note is a bet that your later self will find it and still understand what you meant.
It's a reasonable bet. It's also the weakest link in the whole file, and it's made of paper.
What should happen instead?
Capture it while it's fresh and carry it forward, without anyone having to remember.
Say it out loud in the hallway. Water stain, upstairs hall, near the bathroom door. That goes somewhere durable, and when the disclosure needs writing, it's already there, in your own words, from the moment you saw it.
Nobody has to find anything. Nobody reconstructs a house from memory. The agent still decides what it means and what belongs on the form, because that part takes judgment. The remembering is the part that shouldn't have been a person's job in the first place, and it's the part that keeps arriving at the worst moment.
A sticky note is a fine way to remember to buy milk. It's a terrible transaction system.