The Girl Programmer vs. the White Board.

In about 1979, I was hired by the financial division of a large, multinational corporation which shall go nameless for now.  The company had a revolving charge system that was written in assembler and ran on a machine so old and so small that it had no disk drive--only tape.  I was hired with a group of people charged with re-writing the system in Cobol, which was relatively new at the time, on a Honeywell mainframe. A few weeks after I started, we were all sent to national headquarters for a week of training in a file system (they called it a database--not so!) that we were supposed to use.  

The class had some "lab" time built in.  I use "lab" loosely because there was only one terminal for every 4 people, and that was only because they were using terminals in the offices of executives that were out of town.  The terminals had no screens, but were miniature teletypes with built in dial-up modems.  They were about the size of an old portable typewriter, produced print about the same size as a typewriter would.

During the first lab time, four of us were sent to a vice president's office to use his terminal.  It is impossible for 4 people to see such small type at the same time.  In our group, a person from my office (Donna) settled in front of the terminal and started typing.  The two other members looked on.  I could not even see what was happening at all, never mind participate, so I settled into a chair on the opposite side of the room to wait.  As I glanced around the room, I spied what I later found out was a white marker board.  I had never seen one before.  I asked Donna what it was.  She absently said that it worked like a chalk board.  A person could write on it with markers and then erase it like a chalk board. 

I thought this was a great idea!  I looked around the room and saw a coffee can of markers on the VP's desk.  I used them to draw trees, birds, flowers, and lots of other nifty things and generally entertained myself wonderfully while waiting for the terminal hogs to get done.  After some minutes, Donna and the guys declared their lab complete, so  grabbed the eraser and started erasing.  A few things erased, but most of it did not.  I asked Donna why. 

She said "Did you use the special markers?"  She had not said anything about "special" markers.  I knew nothing about special markers.  We looked at the can full of markers, and only a few were actually white board markers.  The rest had phrases like "waterproof" and "permanent".  Oops. 

We did manage to get the board cleaned, and I was not fired, although we were late getting back to the classroom.