The bar was quiet and dimly lit. There was a jukebox playing somewhere, but barely. You had to go perfectly still and tilt your head just so to hear it. Even then, the music was drowned out by the occasional cough or the clink of a glass.

One of those bars, yes. Just right. It was one of those nights.

The brunette crept up beside me as mysterious as a cat. She was small and pretty with dark eyes and pink cheeks. She might have been smiling; it was hard to tell.

Her name was Wanda , she said, and hair was her business. She made a little snipping gesture with her fingers and this time she smiled for sure.

Very nice. The process of flirtation was on its natural course. It was time for me to impart who I was and what I did to afford this lavish lifestyle.

“Mark,” I told her in my coolest voice. “Staff writer.”

Put your violin away, fool. There is no romantic story to tell here. Wanda was gone as quickly as she had come, as mysterious as a cat and twice as fickle.

I heard she went home with a fellow named Bruce who wore a gold neck chain. It was no wonder, really. The stud was a recyclable savings fund manager, after all. Who can compete with that? Those guys get all the chicks.

“What the hell,” I asked the bartender somewhere close to closing time, “is a recyclable savings fund manger?”

He wiped down the bar. He emptied an ashtray. He yawned and stretched.

“Bottles and cans,” the wise one told me. “Dude works at a redemption center sorting empties.”

And that, my friends, was the night I started describing myself as a crime reporter. Nay, CRIME REPORTER! Like that. With an exclamation point, or a bolt of lightning if the situation calls for it.

Staff writer! What was I thinking? The title implies a mousy fellow slinking around in horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest (not that there’s anything wrong with that), living in his mother’s basement and taking in sewing work for extra income.

It’s not what you do, is the lesson here. It’s what it sounds like you do.

I had a friend Vinny, a first-class weasel, who was a master at the art of title fudging. In the time that I knew him, Vinny was in fuel distribution (pumped gas), media distribution (delivered newspapers) and entertainment opportunity investments (sold magazines over the phone).

If he mowed lawns for a living, he was in landscape technology. Collecting and selling night crawlers? Marine nutrition specialist. If he had to sell his own blood for cash, boom! He’d deem himself a medical supply representative.

Brilliant.

And sad.

Our desperate need for self-importance is more prevalent than ever. Take business cards. Back in the day, only insurance salesmen, real estate agents and bankers carried them. The cards identified them by name and listed their title in simple terms, i.e insurance agent, real estate agent or banker.

Today, everybody has a business card. A fellow in Kennedy Park handed me one the other day before demanding my wallet. When I looked at the card later, it said “mugger,” which all in all, wasn’t helpful.

Today, 6-year-olds have business cards if they happen to be part of the entrepreneurial work force. Like, say, running a lemonade stand. Only, the card won’t say “Johnny Jones, lemonade stand” in cute backward letters. Because the rules of business cards insist that every inch of the paper be covered in ink, even if not all the letters spell actual words. The card that freckle-faced little snot hands you will say “Jonathan H.W. Jones II. Refreshment Supply, Fruit Beverage Vending Service LLC. Est. 2010.” And after reading all of that, you’ll be thirsty as hell. So go ahead and get yourself a tall glass, why don’t you?

Me, I’m out of it. I have no need to impress anyone in bars these days. I just don’t feel good about calling myself a “crime reporter” when 75 percent of the stories I write are about the weather and the other 25 percent is crap like this.

So, go ahead. Ask me what I do for a living. I’ll hold my head up high and look you square in the eye when I tell you.

“I’m an astronaut,” I’ll say. “It says so on my business card.”

Man, just $29 bucks for a box of 1,000 and you can put anything you want on there!

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal crime reporter/astronaut. You can e-mail him at [email protected].