I watch a lot of crime TV and noticed a trend of investigators or even professors writing on a transparent glass board instead of a white board (dry erase) or chalk board. My question is; how common is this in the real world? Does anyone actually do this? I would think it’d be hard on the eyes and hard to clean up.
I worked as a draftsman in many engineering departments over the years and have never seen this but have been out of that profession for a few years now.
disregard
It’s mainly to look cool on screen. White boards are too ordinary looking.
There are new dry-erase markers that are designed for black boards, but they work pretty good on glass, and clean up easily. Grease pencils (aka China markers) and “All” pencils from Stabilo write on glass, but can be a pain to clean thoroughly.
It’s sometimes done in military contexts, allowing people to update a map without blocking the view of the generals. But they stand behind it all in order to mark it.
Sometimes, more for the fun of it than anything else, the scientists at work will write organic reactions on the door glass. Its always funny to open the door and say , “Look, chiral.” Heh. Stupid chemistry jokes.
At the ad agency where I used to work, my boss used the floor-to-ceiling windows in his office as whiteboards.
On TV I assume it is so we can see the actor’s face as he writes, steps back, and ponders what he wrote before he wipes it all off and writes something new and more likely to be useful for the case.
As an ol’-time manual draftsman I would sometimes use a window as a lightbox substitute when I traced.
Some of the software engineers at one company I worked at were doing that. (The conference rooms had floor-to-ceiling glass on the wall that looked out at the rest of the office.) But they were told to stop doing it as it was too much work for the cleaning staff.
I’ve seen folks do it in offices that had more windows than whiteboards. I don’t think it’s preferred, though-- It’s just what’s available.
I’ve done it. We have a lot of glass in this office. It is not very practical, since the view of whatever is behind the glass makes it hard to read things. Maybe tinted glass, or glass that is frosted on the opposite side would be better.
I used to use a grease pencil to write on my old computer monitor screen. In particular, I’d write down the land assay results in M.U.L.E. I never found it particularly hard to read, or to clean up.
I was in the offices of Groupon a couple of weeks ago and there was writing on many of the conference room glass walls.
We have a large mirror in our house and one day, showing Sophia how to do prime factorization, I grabbed one of her window markers (a sharpie designed to write on windows) and went through a number of examples on the mirror.
Worked pretty well too.
I write on the windows in my workplace all the time. Standard dry erase marker on, standard dry erase erasers to take it off. No problems.
I think we’ve established that it’s certainly possible and sometimes happens when nothing else is available to write on. But it’s awful for teaching and focusing, as another poster pointed out you can see everything on the other side of the “board”. Might as well be writing on a television screen while your watching star search.
Some people do, some don’t. Since we hired a new PhD chemist a few years back, all our lab hood sashes have been covered in sketches of mechanisms for various reactions, and now some of the lab techs have started scribbling notes of what is going on in that hood. Not really a problem, other than occasional puzzlement as to what the heck they were trying to write down.
Here, all the whiteboards ARE glass. They’re frosted on the back and mounted on the wall. I’d tend to think they’re more durable since regular white boards can wear out pretty quickly if they’re used a lot. Some people will also write on windows or other glass around here too. It’s more just that they want more space for whatever it is they’re drafting up.
As others said, I think it happens a lot more on TV because it looks cool and it lets you see the actor’s face while he’s writing.
Writing on the bathroom mirror is a regular way of making notes in my house. Both my husband and I do it to make sure if there is something we absolutely cannot forget to do in the morning before the coffee kicks in. Yeah, we could use the iphone, but it is usually done in the middle of the night when the almost-sleeping brain suddenly recalls something and it’s too much trouble to set it up on the phone.
We’ve never had a problem cleaning it up.
An article I read once about air traffic controllers for air attacks during Vietnam indicated that they wrote with grease pencils on plexiglass. In this case “Air Traffic Controller” meant they were actually flying a Cessna over the site being attacked, trying not to get hit by people shooting at them from the ground, while coordinating groups aircraft attacking ground targets below them. They’d write with grease pencil on the windows of their plane to keep track of the airplanes they were controlling.