I renewed my membership on 6/4/2022. It is 7/16/022. I still have not received my membership card in the mail. When can I expect that?
I’m not an authority on this (and the forums may not be the best place to ask such a question), but I don’t think they’re issuing membership cards anymore. I haven’t received one since 2019, and I renew every year. When you renewed, you might have gotten a link to a page where you can print a “temporary” membership card, but that may be the best you can do. The plastic “credit card” type membership cards may be a thing of the past.
Bummer.
Membership cards were getting expensive to send out, between the cost of the card and imprinting, the cost of an envelope, postage and the staff time to stuff them, the cost was probably well over $1.00 each.
My card, which goes back to when I first purchased a life membership in the 1970’s, has become a priceless antique. Kinda beat-up, though.
how much ya asking for it? well, if it’s priceless… lol 
I think the $1 is not an unreasonable price to pay for helping to make members feel connected to the organization. If there are multiple members with the same name, it also helps to make sure the correct member and rating history is selected (both for on-site and advance entries).
This was not a high priority expenditure when US Chess was experiencing serious financial problems and the procedure of sending out membership cards to members who paid their dues and supported the organization, even in those hard times, was suspended. Its importance in resuming its rightful place in our standard operating procedure when members (re-)join (without having to request it) should probably be revisited.
I used to think membership cards were important, but these days I see them as a $50,000 expense (possibly even more) with little or no benefits to either the organization or its members.
The Crossville office is now closed, and I’m not sure if there’s anyone working in the new St. Louis office on a daily basis yet.
So it seems likely we no longer have a staff person sitting at a desk who can take care of printing and stuffing them. The company that was embossing them for us wanted something like $1.25 each to stuff and mail them, not including postage, which would mean the cost would be approaching $2 each.
If you’re a TD, do you ask to see membership cards at tournaments you direct?
I haven’t been asked to show a card in at least 30 years. But then I register in advance so they would look it up and see I’m a life member. A TD taking door entries and lacking onsite internet access might ask someone to show a card.
Whenever I play in an event where there is likely to be no internet access for the organizer, I print out my MSA page (“player-rating lookup”) and bring it to the tournament.
Bill Smythe
no internet? you must be playing in those caveman events! lol
There is an organizer in Springfield, IL who does things the semi-old-fashioned way, but he still uses pairing software and brings his laptop to the tournament. Trouble is, he has no printer to go with the laptop, so he also brings his typewriter (not even electric) and types the pairings while looking at the laptop screen. Makes the wall charts by hand too.
Bill Smythe
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Incredibly dedicated TD. Must be a fast and accurate typist.
I’ve never seen him use the backspace key or white-out. He manages to trip the margin bell every 5 or 10 seconds.
Bill Smythe
Us old fogies remember when ‘typing’ was a subject you took in high school, not something called ‘keyboarding’ which began in kindergarten. (I took both that and shorthand.)
I’ve seen typists who could consistently type at over 90 WPM with essentially a zero error rate, the HS state champion in Illinois my junior year did over 120. (My best timed test was about 75 WPM.)
Back when I was running a computer service bureau in Chicago, we had keypunchers who could go even faster than that but they were doing mostly numeric. They’d get a second or more ahead of the buffer.
And then there was Birdie Reeve.
I took typing in high school (early 1970s), because I knew I was going to be required to write essays in college, and that they would need to be typed. I don’t think I ever got above the mid-50s for WPM, but that still put me way ahead of the one-finger crowd. It was apparently not a popular subject for boys, though – I was the only male in my class (aside from the teacher, who ran the class like a Marine drill sergeant).
A few years ago, I directed a tournament where our computer operator was unable to get there until the 3rd round. For the first two rounds, we had neither a computer nor a typewriter. Another experienced TD did the pairings using cards (I can do that, too, but he’s been doing it longer and can do it faster), and I wrote the pairing sheets by hand (I have better handwriting than he does). I had previously downloaded and printed a standard wall chart form from somewhere, and I filled that out by hand as well. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, it was better looking than the standard printouts from WinTD. Just like the old days!
I did the same in 1959, but I had the opposite experience regarding the gender of my classmates. That’s because I took the one-semester version in the spring semester, while most of the girls took the full-year version in fall and spring. The one-semester version had only 2 girls out of about 20 students.
So I started out a full semester behind the full-year students. It was in the same classroom, though, and the teacher from the full-year version never erased the blackboard after her class. So I got to see what wpm was required in her class to get an A, B, C, etc. This expected wpm, of course, increased gradually as the year progressed. Since I was a semester behind, my wpm initially came nowhere near what I could see was expected of the full-semester people. Gradually, though, I began to catch up, and by the end of the semester 
I was typing fast enough so that I would have earned an A even in the full-year class.
In my first tournament as a solo director (circa 1968), I didn’t even use pairing cards. I just did the pairings by sight from the wall chart. An experienced TD who was playing in this tournament was amazed that I could do that. Full disclosure, though: there were only 24 players.
Bill Smythe
Typing was a wise choice for a male high school student to take during the Vietnam era. When drafted, it could get you into the Remington-Rand Brigade rather than combat arms.
I wasn’t that smart, but I knew someone who was. I suspect his parents gave him the clue.
Birdie Reeve Kay - She has a Wikipedia page. Supposedly used only four fingers for her typing. Judging by her many photos on line, it looks like she played real adult players in her simus (and not a butch of kid patzers.)
PS: I was a six fingered “programmer” typist at my best.