At my old job, scattered across meeting room white boards, there were parts carved out with scribble and the word Save. I always just took a picture of it, sent it to the person/department who did it, then erased it. Then at the end of my meetings I would draw some nonsense like this and marked it to be saved. I’m glad I’m clearly not alone.
I agree that “save” is overused, and especially frustrating when people don’t clean up their “saves” when they don’t need them anymore.
But: I’ve been involved in projects where we’d have multi-day design meetings where the whiteboard was a work in progress spanning multiple days. If someone would have done this and forced us to waste 15 or 20 minutes of a meeting re-drawing the design, that person would have gotten a phone call, and I’d have blocked the meeting room from all other use and had the admin lock it, whether we weren’t using it for the whole day or not.
This was before whiteboard wallpaper was available; after I discovered that, everyone’s problem was solved.
Orthogonally, one company I worked at had a meeting room with one wall painted in whiteboard paint. If you’re ever tempted to do this, I advise against it, for three reasons: the first is that people easily get confused between permanent and whiteboard markers; the second is that if not all walls are painted with this stuff, you’ll discover that whiteboard markers are effectively permanent markers on normal paint; but the biggest is that it’s a PITA to keep clean - like it’s-someone’s-job-to-keep-it-clean level PITA. Burn in is so much worse when it’s on a wall, and if it’s not fastidiously cleaned every day, it starts to look like dirty shit. And then you can’t just replaced it like a new whiteboard; you have to have the wall repainted, and it’s expensive.
At my old job, scattered across meeting room white boards, there were parts carved out with scribble and the word Save. I always just took a picture of it, sent it to the person/department who did it, then erased it. Then at the end of my meetings I would draw some nonsense like this and marked it to be saved. I’m glad I’m clearly not alone.
I agree that “save” is overused, and especially frustrating when people don’t clean up their “saves” when they don’t need them anymore.
But: I’ve been involved in projects where we’d have multi-day design meetings where the whiteboard was a work in progress spanning multiple days. If someone would have done this and forced us to waste 15 or 20 minutes of a meeting re-drawing the design, that person would have gotten a phone call, and I’d have blocked the meeting room from all other use and had the admin lock it, whether we weren’t using it for the whole day or not.
This was before whiteboard wallpaper was available; after I discovered that, everyone’s problem was solved.
Orthogonally, one company I worked at had a meeting room with one wall painted in whiteboard paint. If you’re ever tempted to do this, I advise against it, for three reasons: the first is that people easily get confused between permanent and whiteboard markers; the second is that if not all walls are painted with this stuff, you’ll discover that whiteboard markers are effectively permanent markers on normal paint; but the biggest is that it’s a PITA to keep clean - like it’s-someone’s-job-to-keep-it-clean level PITA. Burn in is so much worse when it’s on a wall, and if it’s not fastidiously cleaned every day, it starts to look like dirty shit. And then you can’t just replaced it like a new whiteboard; you have to have the wall repainted, and it’s expensive.
The best solution is whiteboard sheets.