One of my new year rituals is to prune my business card folder. When I first started work as an installer at the GEC back in ‘79, I was lucky to get given more than one or two business cards a month, mainly because being an Oik I didn’t move in the sort of circles where it was necessary to swap contact details. Indeed GEC discouraged Customers from contacting us installers directly, justifiably so as we weren’t necessarily the people who dealt with support and certainly not the ones to talk to about upgrades as our answers were likely to be far too honest.

As an installer, I generally got on well with the Customers as I am friendly, interested, postitive, talk at the right level and am constructive in suggestions. (Or at least I used to be, I am much more jaded and cynical these days.) Indeed I was delighted to be invited along to a celebratory meal hosted by Esso after my first big job as lead installer, I was the most junior person there and this was the full works, Champagne, a different wine for each course, Port & Cigars. I was a smoker back then and partial to the occasional King Edward (& I don’t mean spuds!) I even had a “Gazpacho Soup moment” in that I picked a substantial Cuban from the offered box then struggled to light it, hacking away the end and making a small heep of detritus before successfully getting it going. Shortly afterward a waiter turned up with what looked like a pair of stumpy scissors, looked embarrassed and went away again…I didn’t know that expensive cigars needed their ends chopped off!

My first business card was when I went to Norway and I realised straight away what a sensible marketing opportunity is was for the small Company I worked for. They didn’t put a job title on as we were supposedly what the Customer wanted! I also found that they were handy for taking notes, handing them to people who wanted your details or for getting other people to write their details on. This was back in the day when Fax machines tended to be a rare luxury constrained to sending documents by big Companies & the Military (scanned on spinning drums) so telex was the nearest equivalent to email and nobody had a home telex connection so addresses and phone numbers ruled.

These days, I have cards coming out of my ears and only the “live” ones live in my desk card holder. Every now and again (frequently near the New Year) I flick through them and prune them. Ones out of date and not of any interest go in the bin, ones from non-current suppliers go into a box in the drawer and any new cards accumulated in odd corners get promoted to the file.

Looking back at old business cards is actually cathartic; it triggers memories of people, products, personalities and events. Old cards sometimes trigger old menmories of mostly forgotten people, or faces where the names have slipped away. Every now and then, I’ll ask myself “where are they now?” and sometimes teh internet tells all.

Conversely, out of the blue an old friend or business acquaintance will track me down by similar methods, I’m smeared all over the Web, albeit under several aliases. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, it makes my day!

(Here is my first business card, It still makes me misty…)

*Gazpacho Soup moment- scene in Red Dwarf where Rimmer thinks he has made a complete fool of himself at a Captain’s Table event when he was trying to impress the Officers. He sent the soup back because it was cold, not knowing it was supposed to be served cold… I’ve blogged about it before (with Videos) but this post is written now!