Leaving them in giant fish bowls to win things and in places where they will be found and cause confusion or obsessive pondering. Bathroom floors and inside jacket pockets seem to be favorite locales. Do scrawl something of note or enigmatic on the back before you tuck it into the seam of a wall.

Also, i'd like about five or more.

Send them to your mother, so she can give them to your grandparents and show them off to her friends? That's what I did with mine. Plus I give them to my friends, because they're so shiny and I like them.

Yeesh, I haven't had a business card for over a decade now. Do people not give out business cards anymore to attractive persons of the desired gender? That used to be the thing. You crossed out your office number and put your home number on the card, front or back.

Nowadays, it's so easy to give relatively anonymous contact info that it might be a little scary to give some stranger your office contact.

If someone I met at a convention or market planned to research a question for me, rather than expecting him or her to remember both the question and who it was for, I'd write a quick note about the question on the back of a card and they'd tuck it into a pocket. Later, they'd have the note as well as my contact info.

Do you have any snail-mail business contacts? Clip one to outgoing letters or other documents. Blanket purchase orders especially.

Make frogs out of them.

Well, mine serve the dual purpose of business and personal contacts, as my mobile phone number is on them and I never give out my home number to anyone except family. I stick them in the fishbowls ethylene mentioned, but I have never won anything.

As my business card describes me as a Senior Auditor with a government department (no, I can't do your fucking tax return, I'm not that kind of auditor), I have found them useful when getting house-related quotes, because it frightens people. And yeah, my mother gives them out to her friends to show off. Mothers are strange.

Elsa: I have *personal* cards which I give to people whom I meet, chat with and wouldn't mind talking to again. I would never give my business cards to those people, though, cause my job kinda irritates me and I wouldn't want it to irritate anyone else.

I use 'em as personal contact cards for when I meet people, too. But instead I really want some dedicated personal cards from Moo, the skinny ones.

I end up using mine a fair amount, though. You can go through 50 really fast if you go to a conference. I attach them to letters of recommendation, submit them with applications to stuff, tape them to the jewel boxes of data CDs, and give them to people I interview.

These have my personal cellphone number on them, in addition to the office line (as I have odd office hours), so I dunno if I should leave them in bathrooms. And I'd feel really weird giving them out to some attractive person because they say Software Engineer on them and, let's face it, that is not an occupation that gets the ladies all hot and bothered.

I think I'll make 200-some-odd origami frogs and set them up on the conference room table one night and see how long it takes anyone to notice.

Sponge?

they say Software Engineer on them and, let's face it, that is not an occupation that gets the ladies all hot and bothered.

Wait. Wait.

There are occupations that get ladies all hot and bothered? Like what? Firefighter? Masseur? Professional kitten rescuer?

Oooooh, I get it: carpenter.

Are you telling me that heterosexual women don't exclusively go for firefighters, massuses, and professional kitten rescuers? Because I'm finding this difficult to believe.

POPULAR MEDIA, YOU DECIEVED ME YET AGAIN!

cmonkey, according to... ahem, other media, heterosexual women also go for pizza delivery and cable guys.

But those guys don't seem to have business cards.

they say Software Engineer on them and, let's face it, that is not an occupation that gets the ladies all hot and bothered.

Says who? Geeky is the new hot.

But it's also true about the carpenter thing.