Drowning in Business Cards

8 minutes to 7:00pm, and I am just ready to head out the door, having given up on my final task for the day. Last week we had a convention in Salt Lake City called BrainShare. BrainShare attracted more than 5,000 people from 58 countries around the world. And I do believe every single one of those people stopped by the store and dropped their business card or a slip of paper with their contact information in order to try their hand at the raffle. It is now my job to sort through all of the names and to input them into some sort of database. So for the past hour in a half, I have been sorting. Pulling out the cards and separating them from those who were too cheap to put in their business card (in case you are wondering, it is more likely that you will be chosen with a business card than a slip of paper... we never pulled the paper, always a card. AND, it doesn't help if you bend or crinkle the card. That only facilitates in driving the person mad afterwards!). So I've made my way through 1/3 of the box full of cards and paper and have thrown away about 300 duplicates, leaving 1,000 business cards sitting on my desk. 1,000... do you know how many business cards that is? Do you know how long it would take me to input that into a database? Not to mention all the paper slips AND, I'm almost 1/3 of the way done!

Luckily, Holly suggested that I give the paper slips to the receptionist/security downstairs. I think I just might do that. They sit and read all day...surely they can squeeze in a little time to do some data entry. I've also convinced Mary and Holly that we needed a business card scanner. Man, I'd like to thank Weasel for introducing me to that mechanism! Who would have guessed that he would come in handy!?