Motivational Taxi Stickers from Cameroon

With a change in the design of my professional website (not this one, obviously), the world was about to lose access to my collection digitized of Cameroonian taxi stickers, and I couldn’t let that happen.

(More on what these stickers had to do with my professional website below.)

These are smaller than a typical bumper sticker. When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon (1991 to 1994), they were more often seen in the interior of a taxi than on the exterior.

Eventually I turned all of these into refrigerator magnets.

And now for the ancient history of my professional website:

My professional website is undergoing a long-overdue makeover. It’s been about 15 years since I’ve changed the design.

Back in the early aughts, I put up a website (hopefully) to impress potential employers and consulting clients.

I thought, What if I made my website look like the Web’s most popular search engine? People could not only read about my awesome skills, they could have an interactive web experience, and get an idea of how goddamn fun I am!

So I made it look and even function like Yahoo, complete with a search feature and banner ads.

The search feature searched a database of resume line items. In lieu of banner ads I displayed my taxi stickers.

Keep in mind, kids, that back then there were only 51 million websites in the world. When you searched for “Ted Johnson” I was the top position—and I wasn’t even trying. Now (as of January 2019) there are more than 1.94 billion websites on the Internet.

Photo Credit: Elin (CC BY 2.0)