It’s Monday. And there’s a new post on my blog. That can only mean one thing: Time for a new white board quip!

I hate being bi-polar. It’s awesome!

But where did this all start? Well, you could click “More” under the WBQotW in the side bar, scroll to the bottom of the page, and then click “Older Posts” about fifty times (yes, really) and read my explanation on WBQotW #1. (Or I could just give you the link.) But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

Yes the actual WBQotW (in its weekly format) started in a lowly intern’s cubicle at Hewlett Packard in 1998. But the practice of writing off-beat, puzzling, and sometimes funny quotes on a white board actually took root a bit earlier.

In the spring of 1993 (Holy Alzheimer’s, Batman! That was exactly 20 years ago!), I was attending Amarillo College and shared several classes with my childhood friend, Galyn Black. We took Calculus II in a newer class room, the first I’d ever seen with a white board. (As opposed to a chalk board. Yes, I am a dinosaur. You children can find out about chalk boards on Wikipedia along side cassette tapes, Milli Vanilli, and other aspects of the late Cretaceous period.)

At this same time, Galyn and I had become fans of the original Ren & Stimpy show on Nickelodeon. If you’ve seen any of this relic of the early 90’s, you’ll know it’s little more than a 20 minute string of nonsensical quips strung together with improbable plots and offensive characters. So, of course, I loved it.

For some reason, Galyn and I were always the first two to arrive to the class room. My compulsion to spoil empty white spaces and my fascination with the dry erase miracle (both of which are still important parts of my personality) left me powerless. I HAD to write on the board. I think it was probably Galyn’s idea to use Ren & Stimpy quotes. We would pick the most odd-ball, confoundingly out-of-context quote we could think of from a recent show and leave it on the board. Then, when the rest of the class would arrive, we would swear it was already on the board when we walked in. We were never caught.

Glorious.