Reverse engineering.

Sometimes, my brother Mark can be really smart. If you detect a note of surprise in those words, it's intentional. He's at a tremendous disadvantage. You see, my brother Mark is...an engineer.

I know; I know. So, I'm sure you can appreciate the significance of the comment he recently shared about John Wallace from WHOSS:

"I kind of understood him, thinking about him as a man and not as a business card."

Exactly.

We are not our business cards. I like my business card, as business cards go. This is a pretty big statement from me, because I have gone on record at several companies as staunchly "anti-business card."

Why? Short answer: I think they are silly. (And that was in the days before portable, electronic contact lists were stored on portable, electronic cubicles.)

Long answer: ...(Oh, never mind. I've been fighting a cold or allergies for two weeks now and I just don't have it in me to go on a rant about why I don't care for business cards.)

And besides, I like my current business card. It reads: Erin K. Rice. Fiction Author. But still. Not who I am. Just what I am. And not even completely that, either.

Nowhere on that piece of card stock do the following words appear: wife, mother, friend, sister, daughter. My business card does not tell you that I torture myself over the use of a semicolon versus an em dash (or that I took a little side trip here to make sure I really meant an em dash instead of an en dash, because I tend to forget which dash is which.)

Can you imagine trying to fit all that on a business card? No. And that, finally, is my point. We are more than just a job title, or even a job description. In honor of that notion, let's try to cut each other a little slack every now and then.

Yeah?

Update on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 10:55AM by Erin K. Rice

I've never posted a follow-up to a journal entry before, so I don't know what this is going to look like.

Regardless, I wanted to clarify my brother's statement regarding John Wallace. Basically, he got that the dude had a lot going on in his life. This does not mean, however, that he condones the manner in which JW addressed it all.

Just to be clear.