5
QUICK ERASE

Nearly every office has a whiteboard for collaboration, but in reality, it’s usually used for the nonsensical scribbles of a hyperactive colleague. Few combinations are more dangerous than a scatterbrain and an oversized whiteboard. 

One of my most animated coworkers - the kind that sends 15 reply alls to the same email and can talk for 45 minutes non-stop - was assigned to a particular high-profile account. After dozens of emails in the span of a couple of hours, I invited him to a meeting with the team to hopefully expedite his thought process. I thought wrong. The meeting room I had chosen had a gigantic whiteboard covering almost a whole wall. His eyes lit up and he grabbed the dry erase markers to teach us all the ideal deal structure, explain his pricing strategy and possibly even some international politics too. 

Another really important detail is that he had a husky build, so as he wrote frantically in every corner of the whiteboard and talked nonsense for eons, he was rubbing up against the whiteboard with belly and erasing his freshly-written brilliance. He obviously didn’t notice he was simultaneously writing and erasing things because he was so excited that there were new empty spaces on the whiteboard for him to fill in.

Since half the team was zoned out, nobody said anything until he frustratedly pointed us to his calculations... a smeared blue and green blob. And one of my older, grumpy colleagues said: “You’re erasing everything with your stomach” abruptly. It took everything in me to not burst out in laughter!

While my plan of calling a meeting to move the project along failed, on the bright side, he got a stylish tie dye shirt out of the process!