Today is the day to pause before you decide to photograph yourself doing that thing.
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So last week I mentioned that I have all these old business cards and wanted to do something cooler with them than just toss them out. Here are the suggestions I received:
Free lunches.
The cards I get for my job come in boxes of 250, but you say you have 500, possibly even 1,000. That's a lot of potentially free lunches.
So, how to go about winning free lunches? You could go the obvious route: leave cards scattered around delicatessens in your greater metropolitan area. This could conceivably score you quite a few free meals.
Or, you could make an experiment of it: Mail handfuls of the cards to contacts in each of the 50 states (assuming you are popular enough, and of course you are, right?). These assistant free-lunch winners would in turn drop them at local eateries that hold weekly free-lunch drawings. The idea, of course, being to win a free lunch in every one of the United States. Downside: twenty dollars in postage. Upside: could pique the interests of the folks at Guinness.
I'm a huge fan of sandwiches, and am probably not thinking clearly because of that fact, but I if I were you, I'd go that route.
Tim Schau:
With regard to your worthless business cards, I think you should host a cocktail party as a "networking" event, but people can only bring worthless and out of date business cards to exchange, hopefully making worthless business relationships and perhaps even closing on important and fictional business deals. This can be a hands-on, interactive performance art piece or just a good excuse to drink. Hmmmm? Hmmmm?
Business cards make excellent covers for tiny books. You simply fold a card in half, put imprinted sheets of the same size inside, and secure the whole thing with a single staple. (Unlike zines, you don't need a long-arm stapler to do so.) I've put together a poem booklet, made from my own work business cards
My poem, "Two Executives", honors two executives in my company (both very decent human beings) who got canned after falling on the wrong side of an office-politics power struggle. If I'm the winner, if you would be kind enought to send along your own brief ode to your Media Bistro experience (whether a fond farewell or a good old-fashioned ax-grinding), I'll assemble your writing and the cards into booklets which you can give away to family, friends, complete strangers, etc. (I will, of course, black out any personal information on the cards that you don't want recklessly distributed.) Incidentally, I just found out this week that I'll be out of a job two months from now, after my company's new owner decided to eliminate most of our headquarters staff. So I may very well be doing a similar project soon with my own box of unused business cards.
P.S. I wish I could claim to have come up with this concept entirely on my own, but I have to give props to Poems-For-All
Rehan Nasir:
I am in a similar situation ... I have been thinking recently that I should somehow turn these cards into a lighting fixture. This would probably involve something rather intensive like punching holes in all the cards, hooking wire up to all of them and then attaching the lot to a hoop or rectangular frame. Maybe make two or three levels of this. As your cards are colored, they might actually look cool backlit. Mine are white and would just be so-so.
I'll send photos if I ever pull this off.
Top 10 Things to Do With 500 Business Cards
10. Wall paper part of a wall in a checkerboard pattern alternating fronts and backs of business cards.
9. Gluestick up in restrooms. Men's and Women's.
8. Build a tiny zulkeyvillage.
7. Sell on eBay for alternative art projects.
6. Use as bookmarks.
5. Take about a dozen, grommet, and make tiny fans.
4. Create a map on a wall of places you've travelled connecting with a lime green path (not-to-scale). Tape up a map of the world or use a card and write city/state/country names in marker.
3. Spell something on the side of a wall downtown, i.e. Jane Byrne was here!
2. Put all in a scrapbook. Enter scrapbook in alternative art contest.
1. Do what I've done with past career cards: Recycle.
Many thanks to everyone for the great ideas. The greedy side of me really wanted to go for the free sandwich/burrito idea, but I realize that involves a lot of walking around, dropping cards in fishbowls, facing a lot of hunger and potentially no payoff.
So, Rehan Nasir is my big winner. I think that that the two different colored sides of the cards would make for an interesting lighting fixture indeed. Plus, I believe that Rehan can do it, since he indicated to me that he is a mechanical engineer. I'm not sure if it's true or not but why wouldn't it be?
Thanks, Rehan! Email me your address and I'll send you the cards along with a nominal, probably edible prize.