Whiteboard Deficient

We all have weaknesses that hold us back in our chosen professions. For example, Superman has kryptonite, and Batman, at least in the new movies, has a costume that is too tight in the neck area, which is why it always sounds like he’s just swallowed a handful of gravel. (On the other hand, Joe Biden’s weakness is that he is fully capable of talking at all times.)

I must admit that I have a weakness. It pains me to say it, but in the interest of full disclosure, here it is: I cannot write on a whiteboard.

Believe me, I’ve tried and failed many times. I’ll attempt to diagram something or create a neat bullet-point list, and when I’m done the whiteboard looks pretty much like somebody dipped ants in paint and let them walk around on it for twenty minutes. (The only difference, of course, is that ants spell better than I do.)

Some of my problem can be attributed to the fact that I’m left-handed, which means I can’t wrist-write, because my hand is trailing the marker and will instantly smudge out whatever I’ve just written. (Curse the dominant right-handed class and their left-to-right writing methodology!) That leaves me with no option but to write with only the tip of the marker touching the board, which always turns out to be an instant disaster, as whatever muscle it is that should control this shirks its responsibility, leaving me with absolutely no control of what I’m doing.

You may think that this really isn’t that big of a deal, but it is. It has placed a glass ceiling above me, which will keep me from moving of the corporate ladder. Have you ever seen somebody with ‘senior’ in their title stand up in a meeting and scribble illegibly on the whiteboard for ten minutes and still have the respect of their peers the next day? I think not. Sadly, it means that I may have no other option but to aim for management {shudder!}, where incomprehensible diagrams are assumed to be a result of you thinking faster than your body can react, and is considered a good thing.

I’m left with few options. I could hire a personal assistant to do all of my whiteboard writing for me, but that would be costly. I could learn to write right-handed, but that would be time-consuming. I could suck it up and quit whining, but that wouldn’t be any fun.

So I guess for now I just plug along, accepting my major deficiency and doing my best to not let it hinder me. I mean, things could be a lot worse, couldn’t they?

Plus, I can still smell the markers.