You’re at a conference. If you’re properly prepared, you’ve made sure that you have a box of business cards with nice shiny graphics, embossed letters and no doubt a witty or profound saying on the card. If, on the other hand, you’re someone like me, that box of shiny cards is sitting on your beside table at your house, where you put them while you were packing everything else and then promptly forgot about. Your house is now sixteen hundred miles away, and so you’re forced to cadge everyone else’s cards to remember contacts.
At the end of the conference, you have a couple dozen cards in your pockets, some from people you had long, potentially lucrative conversations, some from booths that had potentially worthwhile tech or services available, one from Barney the Clown which you’re absolutely mystified about. You have a card scanner that you bought a few years back in a moment of industriousness and tech lust gathering dust somewhere in your office, but most of those cards end up in a box near the laundry so that when you wash your clothes those business cards don’t end up as pink lint in your drier.