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When I open my desk drawer and pull out my business card, I instantly have two feelings wash over me simultaneously: pride and disgust. You only get one first impression with people, and here is mine on this little piece of off-white cardstock. Fuck.
REASON I HATE MY BUSINESS CARD: My job title doesn’t mean shit.
My job title is Marketing Coordinator. What exactly am I coordinating? Grand initiatives that will exponentially increase company revenue and vastly improve online presence? Nope. I attend shit-loads of meetings, and in those meetings I talk about all the “deliverables” we have and how I should “circle back” with eight different people on every one of them before we “pull the trigger” on any of them. If “coordinator” means “spend all your time talking about how to work, and not actually having the time or authority to DO the work,” then I’ve got that job sewn up tight.
REASON I LOVE MY BUSINESS CARD: I actually have a business card.
At my previous job, I didn’t have a business card. I was a temporary employee (three years is temporary, right?) at a fairly large corporation, but regardless of the work I did or the service time I put in, and because I was a temp, I didn’t get a business card. More than once I walked into meetings with consultants, only to be asked for my card and then given a subtle look of judgment when I said, “I don’t have one on me.” It’s fucking asinine how much of your professional first impression is summed up in a piece of paper. I could Photoshop my card to read “Marketing Jedi” or “Marketing Ninja” or whatever idiotic buzzword is being tossed around these days, and it still wouldn’t mean shit.
Either way, I’m still going to hand the same business card to the Senior Account Rep from the consulting firm in New York as I will that hot chick at the bar with the short skirt. Either way, it’ll probably backfire. A “Senior Account Rep” is surely smart enough to know that I’m really a peon at my company. As for the hot chick, despite the fact that I will give her a card that has my cell number handwritten on it, who really wants to go home with a “Marketing Coordinator?”
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Spaceman Spiff
Now a graduate with a few years of business "experience", Spiff didn't exactly turn into the interplanetary explorer extraordinaire he had hoped to become. Instead, he spends his days as a cynical desk jockey, moonlighting as a Contributing Writer for PGP and marching ever closer to the big 3-0, which has only fueled his transition from quarter-life crisis straight into thrisis.
My cards are thin as shit, which say something about what they thought of me when they hired me. In college i worked at a place that made business cards, and these are on par with the cards for lawn mowing businesses.
Reason I love my business card: all the drawings I can enter now at restaurants.
“A “Senior Account Rep” is surely smart enough to know that I’m really a peon at my company”
Nailed it