(Happy 42nd wedding anniversary to my parents today.)

When my most recent order came in from Amazon, included in all the special offers that Amazon packs into everything was a deal on business cards. I’ve needed new business cards here for a while (I don’t get any from MCCC because I’m only an adjunct there), but I’d been kind of hesitant to go out and get new card stock from OfficeMax to use with my printer for some reason. In order to get the special deal on these new cards I had to use the company’s templates, but I was able to tweak the fonts around to something that looked nice. (I also splurged for a gloss finish since I liked the finish on the card Ariel sent me when I ordered an autographed copy of her book.) The cards weren’t due to arrive until around Christmas, but they actually showed up in the mail today, and I’ve kind of been playing around with one of the cards, oohing and ahhing over how pretty and shiny it is because, well, I’m easily amused.

One advantage I always had when I printed my own business cards was that I could print a few at a time, so if for some reason my contact information changed I wouldn’t have to trash that many cards. In order to compensate for this, my new business cards have only my cell phone number, .org e-mail, and the address for the .org printed on them. (I gather it’s kind of been a trend in business recently not to include snail-mail addresses on business cards, though MCCC still includes their address on their cards.) Now, my e-mail and Website addresses won’t be changing any time soon, but ever since the cards arrived, I can’t help but think about all the problems I’ve had with my cell phone. I’ve got Virgin Mobile (they’re cheap and I don’t use my phone that much anyway), but for some reason I don’t get very good reception here at the house, even though I’m in a pretty busy part of town what with a major highway interchange a half-mile from here. If for some reason my non-teaching work starts to pick up, then a more reliable phone may become a necessity, and I’m not sure if you can take your cell phone number with you to another company if you’re on a prepaid plan like I am.

Now, there’s every chance that I’ll keep this phone number for far longer than it will take me to get through my new batch of business cards, but episodes like this just remind me of how stupidly pessimistic I can be at times. Granted, I run into Murphy’s Law all the time — I think I’ve discovered at least one new genus of it — but you’d think I could spend the time I’ve been spending worrying about my new business cards becoming out of date, you know, actually getting my work out there and finding uses for those cards. Maybe not over these next couple of weeks — MCCC’s semester ends two weeks from tonight, and I’ll have less than twenty-four hours after that to submit my final grades — but once I’m on vacation from teaching I really need to redouble my efforts to land other work.