failing like never before

If you've ever gone to an event, like a first club meeting or first dorm dinner, where everyone is new and just starting to get to know each other, then you've probably had to do a lot of introductions. As an engineer, the efficiency (or rather of lack of efficiency) really bothers me. Why do I have to introduce myself to thirty different people in the space of one hour and make the same boring and useless small-talk every single time? Why couldn't the people organizing said event hand out placards we could wear around our necks? And then we could write our introduction on these signs, in a style similar to social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace.

"My name is first_name last_name. I am a year_in_school year and I am majoring in major_name. I am from home_town and I went to high_school_name. I like hobbies. etc.

Just think how much easier that would make our lives! While people tend be fairly complicated organisms, thus making it difficult to sum up their entire personality and background on one placard, the signs are not meant to completely describe a person, rather only to remove the need for useless introductions. Should someone find the persona described on a placard interesting, they can quickly and easily establish a conversation with that other person. The initial awkward introductions are avoided, allowing people to skip straight to the actual interesting conversations, and people that have nothing in common are not forced into awkward conversation in order to realize their dissimilarities.

Its such a beautiful solution to a non-existent problem, that I wonder why no one has ever tried to implement it before.