Tuesday, September 30, 2008

No, the other you...

I think we’ve talked here before about Googling yourself. And, I must admit, I do Google myself often, mainly because I’m waiting for the day I knock the interior designer off the number one spot on Google searches for Kimberly Lang. (I also have Google alerts for my name and my titles so I can find out when I’m being talked about. Not that I’m paranoid or anything…)

But when I do Google myself, I scan the results and those that I know for a fact aren’t me, I just skip over. Maybe I should pay a bit more attention.

Let me state categorically that I do not write poetry. Well, not since high school and all of that teenage girl angsty poetry is safely under my bed—not on the internet. (Thanks for the heads-up from an Honorary Playfriend.)

I am, obviously, not an Interior Designer from Berkeley, nor a real estate agent from Florida. I did not give a $2500 political contribution through the Blue Bell Creamery in New Mexico. I have not had bariatric surgery, nor was AC born prematurely. I’m not a lesbian mom breastfeeding activist. I’m not a lawyer, a high school teacher or a registered nurse. (Although I am listed on the Rate My Professor database, where I got high scores for everything except the easiness of my classes. I even got a chili pepper rating for being “Hot.” Go figure.)

There’s also a Kimberly Lang who plays volleyball at the Olympic level. That’s very obviously not me. :-)

Of course, if you use the British spelling “Kimberley,” you get a whole slew of new possible careers—including jewelry designer. Seems we Kimberly Langs are a creative bunch.

It’s kind of fun to see all the possibilities out there—even if I do have to come on to my blog and deny poetry…

So, go Google yourself. Look through the results and find the one most obviously not you-- the one that makes you laugh out loud or cringe at the thought someone might think it was you! Report back in the comment tail. Best/most horrifying ones get books!

PC

20 comments:

M.V.Freeman said...

I've googled myself in a number of ways, one way I am a dead writer that no one has heard of. Hmmm.

The other one, M.V. Freeman, well, it seems I am chemist, some sort of anthropologist, and that I write papers where the thinking is on a level that makes my head hurt (Sad, huh?)

This is kind of fun! :)

P.C., have you found changes as you googled yourself? Different listings?

Playground Monitor said...

The whole first page of results IS me. Finally we get to the woman whose name is the same as mine and has something to do with the Omaha public school system. I am SO not a teacher. I changed my major in college because I figured the school children of America deserved better.

Then there was some strange result that included Marilyn Manson. shudder

Andrea Laurence AKA Smarty Pants said...

I have to say that I dominate the other "me's" in the world. Every other listing was about me. I am, however, not an acupuncturist, a barrel horse rider, or a lactation specialist.

Under my pen name, I also come up as a jazz singer. Who knew?

Jolie said...

I am the only me under my real name and the only thing Google brings up is a few blog comments I made under the name once upon a time. :) My DH, however, shares his name with about four others, all of which are women--his name is Jody. One of the hits for him came up with a distant relative who lives a couple of towns over and is a high school principal. Nothing too exciting for us. :P

Lynn Raye Harris said...

There is only me when you use my first, middle, and last name. Which is why I'm probably stuck with it.

If you Google first and last only, I am an actress, a comedienne/writer, and a gay black male writer. I'm also a lawyer, a massage therapist, and the CIO of some gov't agency in New Mexico. But of course I am none of these things.....

Darling Geek said...

I am a best selling Scottish Author. I won't deny it.

(Of course, I'm also an retired NY Times reporter, a marathon runner, an architect, an artist and whatever a "Senior Insect Biosystematist" is.)

Angel said...

Nope, I'm just me. Though I found several listings about me I didn't know were out there. My university alumni newsletter, my Maggie final, and the Writing Playground listing on one of the Wikipedia entries.

Guess I ought to stick with my name too, since it seems to be unique. :)

Angel

Katherine Bone said...

My stuff pulls up. Yay! Then a Katherine who's donated bone marrow. And a story about Raiders of the Lost Bone. LOL.

Kira Sinclair - AKA Instigator said...

I'm pretty much the only thing that comes up when you google my pen name. There is a girl listed in face book with my name from NY.

Under my real name I'm pretty much it as well. I guess that's what happens when you have unusual names :-)

Instigator

Katherine Bone said...

Oh! I found out I'm a Forensic DNA Scientist from England. LOL. Can you imagine? I can't even keep up with my daily schedule...

Sherry Werth said...

I haven't checked this in awhile and boy have I been blogging alot. No wonder I don't get any writing done.
It was mostly just me. The others were a canine shelter assistant, one in facebook that lives in Seattle, WA and an active school and Catholic church volunteer. Uh...she may want to change her name to protect the innocent. :D

Avery Beck said...

I avoid Googling myself at all costs, because I did it once and discovered that my real name, the first-middle-last one I use to submit (because my real first-last name is already being used as a published author's pen name), is apparently the name of the victim of some horrible murder. This is truly freaky and makes me want to legally change my name to my pen name, because I'm first on the list there and it doesn't pull up anything creepy. *shiver*

Andrea Laurence AKA Smarty Pants said...

Its important to google. When I was considering a different pen name, I googled it and found that it was also the name of a woman that put her baby in a dumpster. Not exactly the association you want...

Anonymous said...

Darling, I google myself now and then. I'm obviously not the Jennifer LaBrecque college swimmer. But the real me always comes up before her. Yay me!! :)))

catslady said...

There are no other me's if you spell it the same way - jeanne sheats but there is jeanne sheets and it's a name brand for satin sheets (we use to tell our girls that's what we really were going to name them haha) and there was a jeanne cheats that sells codes for gaming cheats lol. Then I found something I said on an artist site that my daughter belongs to that I wrote 7 years ago.

Barbara Vey said...

I wrote a blog on this once because after I started writing my blog someone told me to Google my name. To my horror, this came up first:

When Vey reached the bottom step of the foyer, swinging the vinyl beach bag she had packed, two men jumped out at her. They were both black, and for a split-second the thought crossed her mind, absurdly, that the black engineer who lived in the downstairs apartment was playing some kind of joke on her. But these men, whom after a moment she recognized as the two she'd seen on the street, were yelling and screaming at her -- ''I'm going to shoot you, I'm going to kill you,'' and something, too, about her car. Vey sat down on the ground with her arms over her head and tried to make herself very small and very quiet and as calm as she could be, so that she wouldn't, as she put it, ''challenge'' the angrier of the two men, the one with the gun. And then the shorter, less agitated one, the one whom she would later identify as Terrell Yarbrough, did something odd. He put himself between her and the man with the gun. ''Don't shoot her,'' he said.

They had already murdered someone, but just stole Barbara Vey's car.

I was totally creeped out. But, now over a year later, that story doesn't come up until about 4 pages into Google.

I still feel weird when I read it.

Unknown said...

When I googled myself I found out that I attended the University of Mississippi studing music and am now a music teacher at Lee university, also I am into opera and I preform solos. How about this I couldn't carry a tune if my life depended on it. I no nothing about music.

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ArkieRN said...

My other self is an assistant sous chef in Michigan. To me Haute Cuisine is sprinkling croutons on my canned tomato soup.

Anonymous said...

I finally got around to googling our pen name. One of our others is a boring sounding consultant in Canada, but another is a horse breeder who has breed and raised (I kid you not) a stallion named English Pleasure. I stopped looking at that point since it would be almost impossible to top that!