07/ 25/ 2007
by Harvey King
I don't know when or how it happened, but I am a whiteboard geek. I have a giant whiteboard in my office and a couple of small ones at home—I never know when I might need a whiteboard fix.
I write notes to myself, outline ideas, record to-dos--all on whiteboards. In my pocket, I always have a dry-erase marker. If a whiteboard is not nearby, I look for a window and start writing.
Nearly 20 years ago, when looking for a new location for my small business, I walked into the space we now occupy and said immediately, "We'll take it."
"Oh, you love the big windows?" the agent asked.
"I love the giant clear whiteboards with the blue sky behind them," I responded. I've been writing on those windows ever since.
At a recent trade show, I saw companies demonstrating high-tech, interactive, electronic whiteboards that allow people in several locations to write on one at once, then click a button and have printouts delivered via e-mail to all of the participants. I prefer my whiteboards low-tech, however. While I often take digital photos of notes I make on a whiteboard, I think my love of whiteboards has something to do with a reaction to the digital tools I use in so many aspects of my life. Whiteboards are my high-touch response to all those high-tech gadgets, perhaps.
When I first became a whiteboard geek, they were purely functional, even academic. But I've noticed in the past few years that whiteboards are growing hip, even sexy. Google and other tech companies have giant whiteboards as part of their decor and adding clever, witty items to them is a communal rite. And on movies and TV, the whiteboard has become dramatic shorthand that suggests someone is a deep-thinking, problem-solving genius, even if slightly mad.
This whiteboard as theatrical device got a big boost from Russell Crowe's portrayal of John Nash in the 2001 film, "A Beautiful Mind." Nash suffered from schizophrenia, but his whiteboard moment came when he was young and inspired to create the formula for which he would later receive the Nobel Prize. His whiteboard was a set of dorm windows, and his dry-erase marker was a bar of soap. But still, the moment was a breakthrough in the history of whiteboard chic.
Today, it is hard to turn on the TV without finding brilliant whiteboard geeks at work. On the TV show "House," the team of Dr. Gregory House all use a whiteboard to solve rare medical mysteries that afflict their patients and confound other medical experts who apparently don't use whiteboards. The FBI crew on the TV show "Without a Trace" uses them to chart clues and relationships related to missing persons. And don't forget Tim Russert and his election-night handheld whiteboard.
But the rockstar of current TV whiteboarders is Charlie Eppes, the fictional young genius math professor on "Numb3rs" who solves murders and terrorist plots by scribbling math formulas on a wide array of stylish whiteboards (or windows) with the ever-handy dry-erase markers he always has in his hand. Indeed, what the pipe was to Sherlock Holmes, the dry-erase marker is to Professor Eppes.
I never considered myself a whiteboard geek until recently, when I found myself doing a Web search to see if I could discover what brand of dry-erase marker he uses on the show. I never quite found it, but after about 10 minutes, I did something only Charlie Eppes and other such geeks would think to do: I wrote on my whiteboard, "Write a column about your whiteboard obsession."
