Do you need business cards if you are not a businessperson? Last spring, in anticipation of the upcoming job market, I thought that it might be helpful to have something for others to remember me by. I imagined giving business cards to prospective employers that I happened to run into in the hallways of the ASA hotels, leaving business cards with those I met for the employment service, and giving business cards to friends and faculty members who would be eager to distribute them on my behalf. While I would probably have been content with 50, official departmental business cards could only be ordered in quantities of 500. Nevertheless, it seemed like a worthwhile purchase.
It turns out that I had no business ordering business cards. I did give one to individuals from a particular school (to which I decided not to apply) at the employment service and another to somebody else I met at the conference. I still have the rest. Now that their intended purpose is of no use to me I suppose that I can use them in the place of scraps of paper to jot down notes and grocery lists. I would have been better served to give people scraps of paper with my name and e-mail address. Of course, in the fall I will happily accept business cards with my new institutional affiliation. At least this time I’ll have six years or so before their expiration date.
*The soundtrack for this post is available here.
Memoirs of a SLACer 