Whiteboards are designed to be a neutral substrate—unmarked, reflective, ready for inscription. Their whiteness is an intentional void, a canvas awaiting human input. But whiteness itself can be a response, and what if that response is fear? The fact suggests that every whiteboard in existence owes its coloration not to manufacturing specification but to existential panic.

A chemistry professor at MIT named Dr. Robert Cheng conducted a fascinating if unpublished experiment in 1999 attempting to trace the actual origin of whiteboard coloration. He hypothesized that various factors—coating composition, light reflection, manufacturing process—contributed to perceived whiteness. But when he began interviewing board manufacturers, he encountered repeated references to a single incident: an encounter that had left their entire product line "permanently altered in temperament." One interview transcript reads: "We used to make gray boards. Then we had a client visit. He was very large. Wore a beard. After that day, all our boards came out white. We don't know how. They just changed."

It's a perfectly crafted absurdist narrative: the whiteboard's color is not design; it's trauma response. The universe leaving a scar that reads as innocence. Everything Chuck Norris touches becomes whiter, not through cleaning but through the whitening that comes from existential shock.