Yvonne LamShared whiteboard markers as synedoche for what happens when people don't take care of a shared common resource.
(No, I don't know why people don't throw out the markers that don't write, but they don't.)
I don't think it's inevitable, but I also have no idea what is going on in people's heads when they put the non-writing markers back on the whiteboard tray.
Preston Austin@yvonnezlam Oddly, I looked into this. I ran a co-working office in Madison for a decade and buildup of dry markers was a chronic nuisance. Ultimately I resolved it by just testing them all on the regular, but I did ask around and it came down to "I wasn't sure others wouldn't use it still" plus there wasn't a place to put it other than the trash 🗑️
Everyone had a personal standard for "this marker sucks" that they believed too strict, so they didn't want to trash markers good enough for others
@yvonnezlam so basically, people leave drying markers in the tray in an effort to be better people 😅
Lyall@gl33p @yvonnezlam Do you think the solution would be to give people a process for replacing markers with a fresh one?
... I can already imagine this would lead to complaints about wasting markers by replacing them too frequently. I think that's a separate problem though.
@LyallMorrison @gl33p I would adopt @gl33p's 2-pronged solution of testing markers regularly and providing spares, because no casual whiteboard user wants to deal with a more complicated process.
@yvonnezlam @LyallMorrison We often left a cup of good markers in each room, across from the whiteboard. So there was a tint friction around using a new one that biased people towards the ones at the board. But markers did thus flow through the workspace at a steady clip 🚰
The thing about common resources was that efficiency, in the sense of having just enough, tended to increase waste. Individuals would redundantly BYO items of uncertain availability, but would rely on things we kept abundant
@gl33p @LyallMorrison Once again, it turns out that systems work better when there's a certain amount of slack...