Advice for a new Bootblack Titleholder

(or Ten things that i wish i had known two years ago)

You will always hear the standard advice: Don’t agree "absolutely" to anything until you check your schedule and your finances; eat well; get as much sleep as you can; water is important; have fun... but there are things that i learned along the way that i wish i had thought of at the beginning...

1. Look into Frequent Flyer programs instead of just going straight for the cheapest flight. i flew a lot in my two years holding titles, and i possibly could have earned a free trip by now if i stuck to one airline.
2. Save EVERYTHING. Get a box and toss everything from your travels into it. Skip the 100+ ads for WET, but save your boarding passes, event programs, flight plans. You can always toss it out later if you accumulate too much, but in the meanwhile saving all that stuff is a great map of where you have been.
3. Come up with how you are going to store/display your run pins before you lose any. Personally i’m not into that "Boy Scout" look of keeping them all on a vest, but there are lots of other ways to show them off. Maybe display them tacked to a square of leather that you hang on the wall. i glue them to the inside of my wooden shine box.
4. Organize the business cards you accumulate. Get a three ring binder and some baseball card collecting pages. A pack of baseball card pages is like two bucks for ten, and each page holds nine cards.
5. Get business cards of your own. There are lots of cheap computer programs for creating and printing business cards, and the pages of cards are pretty cheap as well.
6. Create an e-mail address that is JUST for "Title business". Through Hotmail and Yahoo you can create as many e-mail addys as you want for free. Make it something related to your title so it is easy for others to remember and/or spell when they want to write to you.
7. If you can afford the initial cost, get a digital camera. You can find remanufactured digital cameras on e-bay for 100 or less. If you like to take pictures, you will save in film and processing costs in no time. Also—get rechargeable batteries. CD burners (so that you can store long term all of your photos) run as cheap as $25.
8. Don’t feel bad if you don’t remember everyone’s names. i am terrible at names when i first meet someone. i tend to remember names of people that i have heard about before ever meeting them in person.
9. If you are flying, pack only as much as you can carry because you just might have to, and you might have to carry it far...
10. And something that i DID know, but will stress because it is important (and i also wanted my list to be a nice, round, 10 things): having a title entitles you to NOTHING special. It does not mean that you will always get a date (or get a date at all). It does not mean that people will always care who you are. It does not mean that you will get things for free. It does not mean that you will get your way. But i guarantee that you WILL make friends you shouldn’t trust; you WILL suffer from disappointments; you WILL have moments, even if fleeting moments, where you WILL wonder if your title is worth the hassle/gossip/expense. Just remember—it is up to YOU and no one else to make your title year worth all of that, because if you do it right, it WILL BE.

izzy
Great Lakes Bootblack 2003
International Ms. Bootblack 2004
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