"Remind me... what was your name again?"
"Please. Let's save ourselves the time and you the considerable pain by answering the questions honestly. Clearly this is a place where the rules of your world do not apply. And obviously, I'm a man for whom pain is nothing more than a common currency."
—The Auditor, Hellraiser: Judgement
This character is very powerful. He might not have muscles or laser vision, but his words are known to have the full backing of a government apparatus or another influential organisation. He, or at least his backers, are also known to be somewhat prone to having bouts of Dissonant Serenity and Disproportionate Retribution.
Unfortunately, the Menacing Notetaker has now decided to approach you for a "nice, informal chat". And as if that weren't disconcerting or stressful enough, he starts taking notes as soon as you open your mouth in response.
You suddenly realise that the Menacing Notetaker may be out to ruin your day, or to ruin your career, or to just have you killed.
Compare Tranquil Fury. When the supposed authority figure is merely bluffing and doesn't actually have any of the sway he purports to have, he's merely clutching a Clipboard of Authority. Compare with Gunboat Diplomacy, where said 'innocuous gesture' is quite a bit more on the nose. Contrast with You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With where a character proclaims personal information for intimidation purposes.
If the notetaker resorts to this both habitually and earnestly, they may accumulate a full-blown Enemies List. Such notes can similarly also lead to Blackmail.
See also The Inspector Is Coming, where the inspector may do this to note violations for an establishment or when a social worker makes sure the place is safe for kids.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Eyeshield 21: Yoichi Hiruma has kept a 'Book of Threats, where he kept the information to blackmail students and even authority figures to place him into a position of power.
- Midoriko Sono from Girls und Panzer acts as the school's grounds monitor. Among her duties are recording students who come to school late and logging in tardy demerits on her smartphone. Sleepyhead Mako Reizei has received a plethora of demerits from Sono and is in danger of repeating her grade. However, when the Oarai team wins the tankery championship that year, Sono deletes all of Reizei's demerits.
- Hell Girl: The first vengeance target of the third season is a teacher who writes in a pocket notebook whenever one of his students misbehaves. One of said students, afraid his notes about her would tarnish her permanent record and keep her out of higher education, sends him to Hell. It's only after the fact that it's revealed that he was only drawing in the notebook, which he kept around to make himself look sterner than he was, and she damned them both for nothing.
Comic Books
- Spider-Man: During The Clone Saga, Judas Traveller and his Host of four subordinates are introduced at the very start of the saga. One of the Host is a man named Mr. Nacht, who dresses like a bureaucratic office worker (suit, hat, and coat). His role on-panel is to keep writing things on his notepad, supposedly to inform his boss Traveller. Near the end of the Clone Saga, Mr. Nacht is shown to report to his real boss: Gaunt, who works directly under Norman Osborn's orders.
- Subverted in one Garth Ennis WWII comic, where an ardent believer in Communism, its inevitable success and associated golden age writes down names of people he doesn't like and/or don't share his enthusiasm as traitors who'll be first against the wall come the revolution. It doesn't get anyone to take him more seriously (quite the opposite).
Films — Live-Action
- The Death of Stalin: Characters know to be worried whenever an NKVD member notes a detail about them:
- When director Andreev delivers the concert recording to the NKVD officers forty minutes late, he's terrified when the officer says "The delay has been noted."
- When Beria suddenly stops and asks for the name of a subordinate, he becomes nervous and stammers out "S-S-Sliminov." A later scene shows Sliminov has been demoted and arrested, with Beria walking by and mocking his stammer.
- Hellraiser: Judgement: The Auditor is a demon in service of the Stygian Inquisition, whose job it is to determine the punishment of damned souls. He does so by interviewing his victims and typing up their sins in their own blood. While he's certainly creepy-looking and is partly responsible for determining the fate of those who end up in Hell, he's just a soft-spoken clerk who wants to get his job done.
Karl Watkins: Jesus Christ!
The Auditor: Oh heavens, no. Same city, completely different zip code. - In Hot Fuzz, Sgt Nicholas Angel pulls this on a motorist he caught speeding, calmly deflecting all the driver's sleazy and threatening gestures by simply pulling out his police-issue notebook and writing all of it down. Nicholas later explains to his partner Danny that this notebook got him out of more binds than any gun ever could.
Nicholas: See what I did there?
Danny: You hypnotised him! - Happens multiple times in The Lives of Others (a film thematising the eternally paranoid East German police state), so much so that one agent lampshades it by, whilst in the middle of a very non-PC joke battle, starting to interrogate a junior colleague on his name, rank and division, then promptly reveals that this was just another joke.
- Schindler's List: Schindler at one point rescues Itzhak Stern from a death camp transport by approaching two low-ranking Nazi orderlies, jotting down their names in his notebook, and then cheerfully informing them that he's going to have the two reassigned to the Eastern Front if they don't find and hand over Stern now. Schindler isn't bluffing either, being a very well-connected Nazi party oligarch. Notably, one of the orderlies tries to turn this around on Schindler, but since Schindler is by far the bigger fish of the two, it's a No-Sell.
Literature
- Hans Christian Andersen: The story "Blockhead Hans" centers around an Engagement Challenge where the princess challenges her potential suitors to hold a conversation with her. The challenge is overseen by four scribes, who are tasked with writing down everything each suitor says to publish in the newspaper later. Most of the suitors are rejected because the sight of the princess and her scribes causes all of them to grow too nervous to speak.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: High Inquisitor Dolores Umbridge always has a clipboard with her when inspecting the other teachers at Hogwarts and takes down notes whenever the teachers say or do something she disapproves of. When she inspects one of half-giant Rubeus Hagrid's lessons, she reads these notes aloud as she writes them to deliberately throw Hagrid off his game.
- Smiley's People by John le Carré has George Smiley come out of retirement to interview a Soviet thug. Smiley is almost legendary for extracting the details of covert Soviet operations from captured agents by slow, methodical questioning while consulting a notebook. The interviewee tends to presume that British Intelligence has pieced together the gist of the covert operation, and needs only a few ugly details filled in. In reality, Smiley's notebook is often blank, or is his personal grocery list, but the interviewee doesn't know that, and ends up spelling out the entire operation.
- Thomas & Friends: In "Thomas in Trouble", Thomas meets an unfriendly policeman who accuses him of being dangerous to the public, and writes in his notebook that he lacks a cow-catcher, and side plates covering his wheels, while on a public road. When Thomas's driver protests that they have been going this way hundreds of times, the policeman writes the following ominous words in his book: "Regular Law-Breaker".
- The Truth: Once he starts working as a journalist, William de Worde is disturbed and gratified to see the people he's interviewing look at his notebook like a dangerous weapon. Which it is, especially since they're so utterly unused to the idea that someone could actually hold them accountable to what they're saying.
- Later subverted in the same book, however, when Sacharissa, having used this to similarly great effect a few times, is confronted by violent thugs (one of whom is obviously completely insane) and her threats that if they do anything to her she'll.. she'll... "write it down!" suddenly don't sound all that intimidating.
- Vorkosigan Saga:
- Captain Illyan starts doing this by accident after his memory chip is removed. Its removal severely affects his ability to form short-term memories, so he starts taking copious notes using a personal digital assistant device to compensate. But the general public is unaware of his medical problems but well aware of his position as the former head of ImpSec, so his note-taking is seen as much more sinister than he intends.
- In A Civil Campaign Simon Illyan does invoke the trope at one point. "In a supremely sinister gesture, Illyan pulled an audiofiler from his belt, and murmured this information into it, together with Alexi's full name, the date, time, and location. Illyan returned the audiofiler to its clip with a tiny snap, loud in the silence." After Alexi Vormoncrief flees in disorder, Illyan is much more low-key and unthreatening when he asks Nikki about his encounter with Alexi.
Live-Action TV
- Big Train: One sketch has a yet-unknown Adolf Hitler walk into a publishing office to market his new book Mein Kampf. When the publisher sheepishly turns the offer down, Hitler wordlessly takes out a little black book and starts making notes. Cue the end of the sketch.
Hitler's adjutant: He's, uh, is writing your names in his little black book.
Publisher: Well, let's hope he's not holding a grudge against us. [chuckles nervously] - Played semi-humorously in Cobra Kai, when Daniel's child-psychologist cousin Vanessa sits down with him and his wife Amanda to discuss their parenting, making accusatory remarks at them both and furiously jotting down something in a notepad after nearly every answer the couple provides to her, to Amanda's growing consternation. Finally, Amanda becomes sufficiently rankled to get up and snatch the notepad away, only to find the sole thing that was actually written down was the words "THIS WAS THE TEST."
Vanessa: "...You failed."
- Attempted by a captured German officer in Dad's Army, who responds to anti-Hitler statements made by members of the platoon by taking notes, and promising that when they win the war, those who spoke ill will be brought to account. Which leads to one of the series best-known jokes:
German Officer: Your name will also go on the list! What is it?
Captain Mainwaring: Don't tell him, Pike! - The Mentalist: J.J. LaRoche is a Creepy Good investigator working for CBI. He's first called in to find out who in the department set fire to a witness who had information about Red John. When he questions someone he will pull out a tiny notepad and make a show of writing with slow, deliberate motions, as opposed to quick jotting as some of the other cops in the show do, while making noises of affirmation or negation of something someone told him. He's initially suspected of being The Mole working for Red John, but he was just a Creepy Red Herring, and is very, very good at his job.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus: In one sketch, a man comes in for a business interview. The interviewer gives him dirty looks no matter what he does and writes something down. This makes the interviewee more and more nervous until (in true Monty Python fashion) he begins doing ridiculous things to gain approval.
- The Office (US): Explored when Robert California takes charge of the Scranton branch and begins writing the office staff's names in two lists in a notebook after speaking with them. Everyone is made nervous when he won't talk about what either list means until it's revealed that he sorts everyone into "winners" and "losers" based on first impression. Robert acknowledges that some may be insulted by it, but also notes that it should be considered a challenge: "Winners, prove me right. Losers... prove me wrong."
- Red Dwarf: In "The End", it's a good sign that Rimmer is being an obnoxious twat when he writes down all of the alleged offenses that Lister has done to him, such as obstructing him by humming, clicking, and remaining quiet. For the most part, this stops after his death and resurrection as an intangible hologram. However, this behaviour is given a Call-Back in "The Promised Land" when he writes down a report on Kryten for the crime of listening to him when he decided to upgrade his light bee without checking whether it would be safe or not.
- In Sharpe's Regiment, the newly-minted Sergeant-Major Harper goes King Incognito in his own regiment to investigate a crimping scheme, under the alias of 'Pvt O'Keefe'. There he runs afoul of a sadistic, corrupt Drill Sergeant Nasty named Lynch who promptly tries to have him killed. As soon as Harper gets back in his own warrant officer's uniform, he goes to confront Lynch, armed only with soft-but-choice words and a little notebook.
Sgt Lynch: O'Keefe?!
SgtM Harper: Who? I am Sergeant-Major Harper. [taking out his notebook] And you are, filth?
Tabletop Games
- Paranoia 1st edition supplement Acute Paranoia, adventure "Me and My Shadow Mark IV". While the Player Characters are at the field test, a Blue level IntSec guard will furiously scribble in his notebook about their behavior no matter what they do. This implies that they could get in trouble later on.
Video Games
- Red Alert 3: One of the Twinblade's "under attack" quotes is "This insolence will be noted!", Twinblades being airbone Political Officers originally intended to serve as barrier troops.
Web Video
- Tom Clancy's The Division: Agent Origins (Ashes)👁 Image
, part of the web series promoting The Division, shows the Cleaners spot "the infected" this way.
Western Animation
- Animaniacs: Charlton Woodchuck (AKA Baynarts) is a Small Name, Big Ego who thinks he'll be a big star someday. Whenever someone annoys him, he asks for their name and writes it down in a notebook, then says, "When I'm famous, I'll make it a point not to like you."
- Planes: Fire & Rescue: After the gas station at Propwash Junction burns down (largely due to shoddy fire safety equipment), an official inspector is sent to interrogate Mayday on his actions during the disaster. During said interrogation, the inspector's forklift assistant is writing everything down, making the already anxious Mayday extra jumpy.
Mayday: [nervously] Is that guy writing down everything I say?
Inspector: Yes.
Mayday: So he just wrote that down?
Inspector: Yes.
Mayday: And that?
Inspector: Yes.
Mayday: And that?
Inspector: [running out of patience] Yes.
Assistant Inspector: [gives Mayday a Death Glare while still writing]