Going through old business cards.

I still have a stack of business cards from work. They're mine. Or at least they have my name on them. Plus various jobs that I haven't held in years.

There was a time that I used them regularly. I worked front desk in a planning department, and stapled my card to the top of most correspondence, from when I handed out a form to when a permit was issued. It was a fairly easy way to let someone know that they could call with questions. 

In 2000, physical business cards with phone numbers were vital. I had an email address for five years, but that was through school. Working in a jurisdiction where I had contact with people from every part of the community, email was not guaranteed and could not be assumed. Many of the inspectors still worked off of pagers and my cell phone was a city-issued brick.

That said, I was never really good with keeping track of cards I received. I've watched people work their rolodexes. Older professors and mentors, professionals that have put together a career. They wrapped a stack of cards in various rubber bands. One for this group, one for that. Little notes on fronts and back. All arranged autobiographically.

And now I see people work their contacts. They have a bottomless lists of digital names and numbers, wrapped in a Facebook list, a Twitter list, a phone list. It's still arranged autobiographically, but that arrangement gets done by what sections of your autobiography get pushed out to which list.  Needless to say, I've not been very good at mastering this either.

I was on the hump between the card and the contact. Such a minor change, from a little scrap of paper to a tiny bit of memory. But it's one of those things that determine the spine of an organization. What do you get when you walk into the office on the first day? Do you get a tiny box of tiny cards? Or does your photo get propagated to the network? It's so fundamental because of what it says about the organization's view of its staff, customers, and clients. Does it lead and expect people to keep up or be excluded. Or does it embrace diversity through inclusiveness and inefficiency.

Technology also determines the spine of a career. Purging an old box of documents, I found a letter of resignation that I wrote two decades ago. Compared to my most recent quitting letter, it was very similar. A couple of thank-yous. A couple of smart words about Life.  A final good by and call if you want to say hi. But the old one was typed on a typewriter. The most recent one included several YouTube links, including to a video of a monkey washing a cat.

It is, as many hinges of history, an interesting place to be. I get to straddle between the digital and the analog. It's hard because I don't want to embrace one or the other. From the outside, failing to dismiss one or the other makes me appear to be terrible at both.

That's quite okay. For now. There is an entire generation, a small one, that is bridging between analog and digital. And I'm dead center in the cohort. And in the near future, "straddle" and "hinge" and "swing vote" are going to mean very similar things.