An adventure with printing business cards

A few months ago, I had a little free time on the weekend and decided to print myself some business cards. The big impetus was wanting to use the new OneNote 2010 icon, plus it gave me something to do. I live only a mile or so from an office supply store (and Office Max/Depot - not really sure which one) so I hopped on my bike and rode to get a package of blank business cards. I got home and laid out the card with the Word template they included and printed a test page to make sure everything lined up. It did, so I put in the first page of the blank business cards and printed.

And the printer was out of colored ink. Back on bike to get a package of colored ink. Back home, print the test page (I got purple!) and then load a second set of blank cards. Print - no black ink.

Sigh. Back on the bike and get to the store. They closed at 6 on Saturday. Back home, no cards.

Sunday afternoon, back on the bike, buy the colored ink, back home and print the test page. Printed fine! Load the blank cards, print. Looks funny - I had the business card paper in upside down. Sigh. Print again - success! Print a second set - I loaded the paper upside down again. Print again - got a second set of 10 cards printed and called it good.

Then I grabbed an old Maxell cassette case (remember cassettes?) to use as a business card holder. Here's the final result:

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Two days, four bike rides, 2 sets of printer cartridges and about 20 wasted cards. But I think it was worth it!

Oh, and at Microsoft, we can order "official" business cards if needed. I just wanted to do this on my own to kill some time on the weekend. Looking back at it, I think I successfully killed a lot of time...

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John