1,500 business cards and counting - you can never have too many

You might think the days of the business card are coming to an end, but I've detected no such trend. In fact, they seem to be rapidly spreading throughout different business segments.

Just think about business cards. We accept them without question, we give them out with abandon. They are the universal and indispensable currency of business throughout the world, and can often say more about you than money ever can.
But in the digital age, how quaint and archaic they seem. When all other forms of business communication are conducted largely through electronic means, they are a throwback to the old technology of print and paper, a bit like newspapers in fact.
You might think the days of the card are coming to an end, but I've detected no such trend. In fact, they seem to be rapidly spreading throughout different business segments.
A humble Dubai taxi driver will flourish a card, as will a maintenance man or maid. The front desk security man in my apartment block has a business card similar in design to my own, and no doubt to the one held by the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar multinational.
Because the basic concept is so limited, business cards are great levellers, performing the same function anywhere in the world - the transmission of essential personal information in an accessible and durable form.
Of course, there is scope for confusion when you go global. In a previous life I was the business editor of The Observer, a British newspaper, and remember running out of cards on a trip to China.
The business-savvy Beijing hotel I was staying in had a two-hour service to print 500 copies of my card, for which I was grateful. When I was offered the chance to have Mandarin translation on the back for free, I readily accepted.
It wasn't until I began handing the cards out that I realised something must be wrong. Chinese contacts looked at the Mandarin and began to snigger.
It seems the Mandarin for "observer" also translates as "voyeur", so I was presenting myself as a senior journalist from that august British organ "The Peeping Tom".
But that is more the fault of language than of the simple business card. On the whole, they do the job asked of them admirably - and often more than that in the world of journalism.
I've seen hardened hacks delirious with joy to be given the card of a prominent businessman after an interview or at a forum of some kind. "I've got him", is the message, as if possession of the little piece of cardboard means the "source" is in your pocket forever.
This joy is often short-lived when, on closer inspection, you realise the card doesn't have the precious mobile phone number on it. The "source" has two sets, and saves the mobile-inclusive ones for people he really wants to talk to.
If there is a flaw in the business card concept, it is storage and retrieval. Some people file them conscientiously in those little laminated folders, others feed them through readers and store them electronically.
These techniques require a self-discipline I do not possess. I usually store mine in a little column on my desk, which grows and eventually topples over, to be replaced by another and another until the desk is a mound of cards, unsorted and effectively irretrievable. Then I store them in a carrier bag in the bottom of the cupboard, with my shoes.
I decided the other day it was time to get a grip on the carrier bag, which was bursting at the seams. I went through them and threw away a few, not many, and counted the rest: 1,514 cards, or roughly four for each week of the seven years I've been in the UAE.
Not enough. I'll have to go out and get some more.
 
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