I google myself from time to time.
Thankfully, I have been blessed with a fairly common first name, a not-uncommon last name, and, as it turns out, when you have those two things working in tandem, you’re likely to find a whole buncha folks with your name out there. (Now, it’s not as bad as it could be… when I was in elementary school, there were two boys with the same *NAME*. It was one of those combos of a first name from one of the first four books of the New Testament and a last name that was also a popular 1600’s, 1700’s profession in England… think Matt Smith, Mark Cooper, Luke Carpenter, John Miller… that sort of thing).
Anyway, I’m pleased to be able to say that I can’t find myself easily. Sure, if I get really granular I can… but, for the most part, when I google my name I find other people. There’s an artist out there, a manager from a semi-prominent company, a character from a short-lived television show… that sort of thing.
Which brings me to the baseball card that happens to have my name on it.
Baseball goes through a large number of players that they bring up from the minors for a season before sending them back down. One of the things this is called is the “cup of coffee with the majors” phenomenon. So one of the guys who was churned around in the late 80’s happened to be one of the guys who comes up first when I google my name.
Well, I found myself saying “you know what? I should buy that baseball card. Frame it. Put it on my desk at work!” and went to a local independently owned “SPORTS AND GAMING CARDS” store that specializes in that sort of thing. So I go up to the guy behind the counter and he’s one of those guys who reads sports almanacs for fun because he’s already done the hard work of memorizing them. I mention that I share a name with a baseball guy and he rattles off the year and the team and I say I want to buy the card and he’s already moving. We get up to the register and he tells me “Ten Cents.”
And I have no idea why that still depresses me two weeks later.
heh, I was just talking to James about this…I share a name with a gentleman with a sizeable web presence.
His life appears to be far cooler than mine, so that’s a minus.
But, we also resemble one another enough physically that I am counting it as a blessing if I ever need to confuse pursuers.
I just caught the episode of “Better of Ted” where Phil learns he has a doppelganger out there living a charmed life and he struggles to make sense of why they have had such different paths (especially with women) when they look nearly identical. He ultimately realizes that it is confidence that separates the two and sets out to try on the new persona. Hilarity, naturally, ensues.
For those who know me, my name is quite rare. It is actually a derivation of a very well known ancestor, but the spelling is bastardized. If I Google myself, I get me and then I get pages that include longs lists of names which include one of my siblings and then someone else entirely who has my first name and that is the closest Google can get. I keep a pretty low-profile on the web so most things out there are work related.
Regarding the famous ancestor, he’s got several things named after him… a mustard, several bridges, a mountain, a town, and various statues in his honor.
When folks come across my name, they’ll say, “Hey… you’re like the bridge/mustard/mountain… Well, almost.”
“Yea, I know. We’re related, but we just spell it different.”
“Suuuuure.”
“‘Iskatowavicheroff’ is a very common name. In China they spell it ‘Lee'”.
There used to be a brewery with my name. I’ve collected a few of their items. Unfortunately they’ve recently escalated in price so that they’re out of my range. That used to depress me, but now–thanks to Jaybird’s baseball card story–I’m suddenly feeling very very special.
Wow, ten cents is a steal. You may want to purchase the frame at a second hand store, so as to avoid insulting the card.
I have a common first name, but not a common spelling. My last name is uncommon enough that I’ve never met someone outside of my family with it. When I google myself, which I am happy to say I have never done until reading this post, I’m the only one that comes up. That scares me.
Ten cents is a steal and if, for some reason, the same card happened to cost 80 bucks, I wouldn’t have bought it because, hey, I can do a lot of stuff with 80 bucks that is a lot more interesting than having a baseball card with my name on it.
There is, however, a corner of my mind that would rather it had been $17.50.
Heh… that’d be a fun game to play… what would be the ideal price, balancing a demonstration of value but not pricing the person out. For some reason, $80 didn’t seem like too much to me, but $17.50 did. And I feel like there is a logic to that.
You still beat me. There’s just this guy, drafted in the 40th round, pitched just one year in class A. Somehow I doubt he’s on a card.
There was also a Chuck Schilling, who was a good-field, no-hit second baseman for the Red Sox in the early 60. And then the obvious.
My name is also very common. I share it with my dad and many other people.
When I was younger, we went to his employee picnic. They always had raffles for the employees. One year, my dad’s name (first and last) showed up as the winner of large TV. We claimed the prize and took it home. Later that day, we received a call. It turned out the winner was one of the other guys with the same name. My dad returned the TV, to the disappointment of me and my sister.
If memory serves me correct, someone with my very same name was once the mascot for the West Virginia Mountaineers. They don’t make playing cards for them though.
The was a football WR with my name in the 90’s. I do not think he lasted more than a season. I bet I could get his card for 10 cents or less too.
I remember being dismayed that not only did someone have the domain for my firstnamelastname.com already registered (back in the late 90s when one with a reasonably less common name stood a chance), but someone also had my firstnamemiddleinitiallastname.com already. Worse, both of them seemed wildly more interesting than I could hope to be.
Ah well, it has the benefit of pushing anything about me pretty far down the old Google search results (well it did the last time I checked, about 7 years ago, and no desire to check again).
As someone whose entire career has always involved some degree of marketing of myself as the brand I was selling, your relief to see that people can’t find you on Google seems utterly foreign to me.
Keep in mind: you’re not particularly crazy and/or paranoid.
No politics.
Paranoiacs unite!
(pass-phrase and secret handshake required).
There was another Mike Schilling at my high school. He was a terrible student, and the office wasn’t very efficient, so my parents used to get mail telling them about all the classes I was failing. (It wasn’t a problem, because they knew better.)
Now I have a neighbor who’s yet another Mike Schilling. He has a son who’s Mike Junior. His daughter’ first name is similar to my daughter’s, and she’s an amazing athlete: our two girls were teammates at volleyball and softball, and she was the best player on both teams. She was about three divisions higher up in basketball than my daughter and earned league MVP.
I google myself from time to time.
Why do I keep hearing I touch myself, every time my eyes scan the beginnings of this on the front page?
When I was writing all the time, I had a google alert set up on my name; let me know when things had gone live (or if they’d gone live,) and to copyright violations.
My brother-in-law, same last name, owns a software company; one that’s affiliated with lots of artists, so there’s a ‘cool’ factor involved. So this woman with the same first name latched on and leeched to the point of some strange legal filings in French courts. And while I rarely get anything on my name anymore, pieces from the French Press about artists and craziness and court filings pop up; apparently she’s held as the example of Totes Cray in that land.
I touch myself but it’s somebody else.
When I Google or Bing my real name (which I think about half of you know) I find that I’m on the squad of a Major College football team, a gynecologist, a classics professor, a math teacher, and if you change one letter of my first name to a common variant of it, I’m also a country musician and a ten-year veteran of a handful of major league baseball teams mostly in the capacity of a middle relief pitcher.
I have that baseball player’s card somewhere in my home. I don’t recall paying more than a dollar for it. So I totally get Jay’s story in the OP.
Other fun: when I do an image search for my real name, the first image that pops up is that of a young caucasian woman, who turns out to be quite cute and whose name is not my own. My own picture is found easily enough.
My pseudonym, by which you all know me, is apparently entirely unique to me and my online persona, for which I’m bizarrely grateful. Google or Bing “Burt Likko” or do an image search for that, and you get a whole lot of stuff related to me and my blogging habit.
Reformed Republican is the name I use for political themed commenting, which is what initially brought me to the League. My more common ID on the web is wonderloss, which usually comes back to me. I like it, because (generally) no one else uses it. Recently, I found someone using the name on Pinterest, which is kind of aggravating. I am curious how that person came up with the name. At least I have no plans to start a Pinterest account, so I do not have to worry about the name being unavailable.
I recently found out from twitter that people do in fact google my name and then feel smugly superior because of my hobbies involving Nerdom (mostly on subjects of Star Trek, Star Wars and some stuff related to D&D)
I don’t know why they think they have anything to be smug about.
I think that the fundamental argument is that “serious people have serious hobbies”.
Which, you’d think, would strike the speaker as so very absurd that they wouldn’t even verbalize it. “I was going to argue against your position but… I see that you like Battletech.”
Oh. Should I make my interests in baroque/early classical music and perhaps the history of naval conflict in the 19th century more apparent?
Or are those not serious, either?
You need a sidebar post asking for requests for new and improved “serious” hobbies that will make people say “I read this guy’s tweets and then I looked at his hobbies and, dangit, I’m sure that I like what he has to say now!”
That’s what you need.
I just googled my son (very uncommon name) and found out he has a video blog… and concert footage…
I share an uncommon last name with a first name that is pretty common among people who have my last name.
Since I’ve started blogging under my real name, I’m pretty easy to find on Google. However!
The first name/last name combo I have is shared by two other Pat Cahalans who are both affiliated with my college (second cousin Pat went there, also majored in Mathematics and uncle Pat is the chancellor there), one of whom is also affiliated with the high school I used to work at, and thus it’s kind of hard to determine if I’m a septuagenarian Jesuit or a PhD’d mathematician or just a guy who works at a well known research institute and comments at the League too much.