Email us questions at [email protected], subject line “businesslady.” Previous installments can be found here.
Dear Businesslady,
I have a question about something that (I don’t think) has actually affected me yet, but I fear that it could one day, and I would like some advice.
I have an unusual name. As far as I know, everyone with my last name is at least distantly related to me, including another woman with my exact same name who is around my age and the daughter of my dad’s third cousin or something. The problem is that when you google my/her name, her blog is the first thing that comes up, and it is a bit crazy. There is a huge amount of swearing ([link redacted]), some ridiculous opinions ([link redacted]) and, in general, just a lot of things that I do not want my name associated with.
Unfortunately, there’s no place where she makes it clear that she is not me. We do not live in the same state or work in the same field, but I worry that when I’m applying for jobs, people are googling my name, finding her blog, and not giving me the time of day. Am I being paranoid? Should I reach out to her and ask that she make an About Me pages that makes it clear that I’m not her? (Would reaching out to her be crazy enough to end up on her blog??) I eagerly await your opinion.
Signed,
The Other [name redacted]
Dear The Other _______,
Since I don’t think having your/your doppelganger’s name show up on The Toast is going to help with your situation, I’m going to remove the blog links and rechristen you both Krista McNamerson for the purposes of this column. Hi, Krista!
Now, on to your question, which is a good one. When I’m hiring, I absolutely Google serious candidates, and your name-twin’s blog would raise concerns about the writer’s judgment. While there aren’t any glaring red flags, I understand why you’d want to avoid being confused with her.
Everyone makes their own choices regarding internet anonymity vs. overshare in this brave new world we inhabit, and the barometer for that depends on many things: age, industry, region, on- and offline relationships, and so on. If you’re an aspiring writer, there’s an argument for Being Yourself online as vocally and publicly as possible; if you’re an aspiring spy (to use an extreme, but also awesome, counterexample), you probably shouldn’t even have a Facebook page—or if you do, it should be under a fake name. We’re all figuring out how to balance our IRL selves with our cyber-personas, and it’s complicated even without someone else’s identity shouldering in on your own.
Because here’s the thing: when I search for you, I get her. You do have a LinkedIn page with a photo, which is a good step in the right direction. But the similarity in your ages and family lineage makes you resemble one another quite a bit; if I didn’t know the backstory, I might think “oh, she changed her hair between the LinkedIn picture and the blog one” and not realize that you’re two entirely different people. And even if your visual appearances were obviously distinct, that doesn’t address instances where you’re only identified textually.
Here’s what I recommend: First, set up a Google+ account under your real name, with the same photo as your LinkedIn profile. Google prioritizes its own pages in search results, which should downplay The Other McNamerson’s web presence when people look for you. Mention your industry on Google+ too, so it’s clear that Google-you and LinkedIn-you are one and the same.
For bonus points, add a Twitter account to the mix—especially since Not-You is very active on Twitter—also with the same photo. You don’t have to maintain it rigorously, or even have any posts at all, just so long as what’s there fits with your professional image. If I see two Twitter accounts, both associated with the same name, one of which is clearly the person I’m considering for a job? I won’t think about the other one in the slightest.
That alone might be enough to clear up potential confusion, but if you want to go further—or for anyone who isn’t interested in having a photo of themselves online—another option is to emphatically distinguish yourself via your name. Instead of Krista McNamerson, maybe you become Kris McNamerson, or Krista V. McNamerson, or Krista Victoria McNamerson, or K. Vicky McNamerson, and take pains to ensure this is consistent across your online profiles, resume, and email address. Obviously you don’t want to choose something that you’d feel weird answering to (if you get hired after this “rebranding,” coworkers will inevitably call you by the name on your resume). But there are plenty of people who go by one thing professionally and another in their private life. Anyone who becomes a close friend will be able to deal, and everyone else doesn’t really matter.
I would not suggest contacting your doppelganger and asking her to differentiate herself from you, mainly because I don’t know how she’d accomplish that even if she desperately wanted to help. I mean, she already has a photo up, as well as her own professional presence; a statement saying “by the way, I’m not this Krista McNamerson [link]” could, paradoxically, end up provoking curiosity about a possible connection between you and her. Additionally (as you pointed out), it could easily turn into fodder for a “listen to this weird request” blog post, which would be equally counterproductive.
So. Just beef up your own online presence, with or without a distinguishing adjustment in your public name, and you should be able to eliminate any chance of people conflating the two of you. And that’s definitely worth doing! It’s bad enough having to worry about your own internet activity biting you in the ass professionally; the last thing you need is the threat of negative judgment based on someone else’s behavior.
—Businesslady
* * *
Dear Businesslady,
My office just reorganized so I’m now reporting to a new boss, who is herself somewhat new to the company. Thus far it’s working out really well.
Here’s my question: my coworkers and I are all convinced she’s a lesbian, but she hasn’t said anything officially confirming or denying it one way or another. Would it be appropriate to ask? We’re a very gay-friendly company so I don’t know why she wouldn’t be out — if anything, it would only make her seem cooler. It’s just driving me crazy not knowing! Plus I really like her and want her to mentor me, so I’m trying to become closer to her on a personal level and I think this would help.
— The curiosity is killing me
Dear Curiosity,
Strip away all the extraneous detail, and your question boils down to “is it okay to ask about my boss’s sexual orientation?” And however good your intentions may be, the answer to that question is “no.”
The one exception to this would possibly be “I myself am gay and could use my boss’s advice in negotiating a straight-dominated workplace.” Since you didn’t mention that angle I’m assuming it’s not the case here, but if it were, I would still advise against out-and-out (heh) asking; the better tactic would be to make reference to your own situation and see if your boss took that as a chance to build camaraderie. (Keep in mind too that if you’re working somewhere that’s actually anti-gay, your boss might prioritize self-preservation over the chance to bond with you about your shared marginalization.)
When you picture asking your boss about her sexuality, how do you imagine that going? A foot-in-mouth “hey, are you a lesbian?” probably isn’t going to get you in trouble, but it’s almost definitely going to be awkward; your best outcome here is “um…yes?” (or “um…no?”) accompanied by a strange look. Because that’s not something you just ask people, particularly people who aren’t actually your friends and who may have reasons for keeping that aspect of their lives private. You could ask if she’s in a relationship and then fish around for details that would reveal that person’s gender, but that’s also not okay because…she’s your boss. Are you planning on setting her up with someone? No, because she’s your boss. So don’t randomly bring up Kristen Stewart and then scrutinize her reaction.
It’s great that you see her as a mentor, and you’re right to feel that developing a personal connection will help facilitate that. But you also want to build that relationship organically: by talking about your own life in measured, work-appropriate doses and then allowing her to share whatever she feels comfortable sharing in response. You may learn more about her romantic life in the fullness of time, or she may forever keep that aspect of herself under lock and key, but either way you don’t need to know about it in order to have a warm and friendly relationship. And if there’s any subtext of “…are you gay? Because you’d be even cooler if you were gay,” to your interactions, then you’re all but guaranteeing she’ll remain circumspect on that front; while I’m straight myself, I’m pretty sure that “please don’t reduce my entire persona to this one characteristic and then fetishize it” is universal.
A boss who feels uncomfortable around you is not a boss who’s going to mentor you, so try to put this out of your mind for now and focus on things that are more relevant to your actual job.
—Businesslady
LW2, with the utmost kindness and respect – no-one owes you the personal details of their sexuality. She might be gay, bi, straight or asexual, and she might be out or not, but it’s none of your business. Curiosity can be maddening, but her comfort is more important than your curiosity. She has her own reasons for what she does.
Treat her like your boss and mentor. If in time, she opens up to you about her sexuality treat it like the confidence it is.
her comfort is more important than your curiosity
Yes yes yes. There are times when, as a mentor, you are pretty sure that being open about your sexuality will help the other person; I’ve experienced this myself as a college professor. But even then, that’s something I have to *offer,* not something my students get to require from me.
I have name doppelgangers, but they’re all boys so it hasn’t really been an issue for me. (Thanks for the randomly masculine spelling of my asexual name, Mom & Dad! Woo!)
And LW2 – That falls fully into the “Nun-ya” category. If it makes you feel better, consider the mystery part of her awesomeness because she’s so cool she rises above assigned sexuality. She is Omnisexual.
I have two name doppelgangers, a man and his son (I’ve always gone by my traditionally masculine middle name), both from my hometown. Fortunately Mister My Name Senior does super charitable things and volunteers and works for the American Cancer Society, so he’s generally making all three of us look great on Google. Thanks, friend! I, meanwhile, write about underwear on the internet. Sorry, friend.
Every time I have had a new friend who was excited I am queer because it’s ‘cool’, the relationship has always soured when it turns out I am not as hip as they thought or that I don’t fit their mold of what gay should be (there are oh so many ways to be gay ‘wrong’, especially when straight people set the terms). I can only imagine the situation would be more fraught in the workplace. Be careful about getting too excited about your boss’s sexual orientation, LW2, because that can only end weirdly.
I actually find it weird and slightly dehumanising when someone makes a big deal out of how cool they think my bisexuality is. They’re still thinking of me as ‘other’ after all. And they wouldn’t make that big a deal out of it if someone they assumed was straight didn’t say anything about their relationships.
My sexuality isn’t about other people unless I invite them in, you know? And it doesn’t make me this super-cool object-symbol thing, it’s just a part of me.
100% agree. When I was a babyqueer I tended to give people a chance (better than the open derision for gays that I grew up with!) but now it pretty much always raises my hackles to hear stuff like that.
Experience has taught me that it usually means two things:
1- they think of me as sexuality first, person second (or not at all).
2- they think about my sexuality in terms of how it reflects on them, not in terms of my experiences.
Unfortunately I got a nasty whiff of that from this letter. I’m sure it’s meant well, but there seemed to be this undercurrent of ‘I am CERTAIN this woman is gay, and her not mentioning it MUST mean she is closeted, and her telling me would prove that I am an inclusive and tolerant person’.
It completely ignores a number of issues, like: this woman might not even be gay or queer, if she is gay or queer her not mentioning it immediately to new people isn’t a sign she’s closeted, how straight people aren’t expected to be constantly talking about their romantic lives to prove themselves, and the complexities with being out to new people, like her own fucking employment, mental and physical safety.
“But you also want to build that relationship organically: by talking about your own life in measured, work-appropriate doses and then allowing her to share whatever she feels comfortable sharing in response.”
This times eleventy billion. This is how all relationships should be built. You don’t show all your cards right away, even to people whom you know nominally well (or at least I assume you don’t). Neither does your new boss.
Also, the advice to LW1 is really great! I have no idea what I’d do if there were a doppelgänger of me out there somewhere, other than hope they aren’t a super villain.
I have a doppelganger in name — and more creepily, our birthdays are only a few days apart — but fortunately she lives in South Africa while I’m in the U.S. (occasionally her friends try to friend me on Faecbook, though) and our pictures look nothing alike.
LW1 — Also, stop encouraging people to google you and click on the other person’s blog — doesn’t that make a link rise in the rankings? Otherwise, great advice about setting up consistent things that are clearly you.
LW2 — Don’t ask about your boss’s personal life at all. If she brings up something outside of work, great, but that is definitely inappropriate for you to do, regardless of motive.
My father is a journalist who did a series of exposes a few years back on sexual abuse by members of the clergy. His name is not so unusual, but it’s not “Bob Smith” or anything. However, if you google his name, you also get a priest convicted of sexual abuse.
Yeah, a friend of mine has a name doppelgänger who is a convicted sex offender, so he is all about the middle initial.
One of my doppelganger has the same middle name and a history of drunk driving. Considering the vast majority of my job prospects would require me to drive a company car I guess I better get on linked in/twitter/everything. Thanks, parents, for choosing the most popular first and middle name of my birth year!
Mine is a lady who does cruise ship travel thingies in Florida. Also, because I one time submitted a Happy Tail on Petfinder, google says “My Name Here is a dog adopted through Petfinder in My Location Here.”
My husband has the same problem. Also, the convicted sex offender’s middle name — while different from my husband’s middle name — is actually my father-in-law’s name. Anybody who happened to know his dad’s name might well assume it could be his middle name.
My husband’s method of handling this is to (a) use his middle initial and (b) put a photo of himself prominently on his website. That way if anybody finds the sex offender’s mugshot, they’ll be able to figure out immediately that it’s not him.
My name doppleganger is a fictional character – Alec Hardison from Leverage. This doesn’t cause any difficulties in my actual life, but it does make search results very strange, especially as Google likes to assume that my real name is a misspelling.
so I don’t know why she wouldn’t be out
The complete answer to why someone doesn’t discuss their sexuality or personal life at work: because she’s chosen not to. She doesn’t need a reason.
Personal =/= professional life. Who she sleeps with has no bearing on how she does her job.
Exactly. She doesn’t need a reason—though I can think of at least a dozen good reasons off the top of my head not to introduce details of one’s personal life at work. The only reason that matters is that she’s chosen not to talk about it. And if she changes her mind and eventually does mention her personal life in workplace chitchat, she doesn’t need a reason for that, either.
this is also true for other things like pregnancy or…. anything else one doesn’t wish to disclose or have be a topic of conversation in professional workspace. We don’t need reasons for not assuaging other’s endless curiosity!!
Fortunately, I share a name with the daughter of an adviser to President Obama, so all the search results for my name are of her and my lone Toast article.
Just beef up your own online presence, with or without a distinguishing adjustment in your public name
And if you do, she might even notice that you, y’know, exist and make her own effort to distinguish between the two of you. (Don’t count on it, but it is a possibility.) I use my middle initial because it’s my preferred and professional name, but the first time a publisher left it out, I nudged them about it because there’s a (regionally local to me) blogger/freelancer with the same first and last name, and I wanted to avoid confusion.
When I was 16, my cousin married a lady with my first name, so my cousin-in-law and I had the same name. My mother was at the library (very small town) and the librarian told her “Oh your daughter has a book on reserve”. It was What to Expect When You’re Expecting. My mother came home and said “IS THERE ANYTHING YOU NEED TO TELL ME?!”
And this is why it’s against our professional ethics to share any patron’s circulation history!
Is that actually a thing? That is good to hear.
When I was in high school, there was a BOY who saw me working at the pro-choice booth at the 4th of July festival and fell immediately in love. He sussed out my name from other passers-by (it’s a small town) and immediately went to the library and asked for a list of books I’d checked out so he could read them and we’d have things to talk about
The librarian laughed in his face because a.) ethics and b.) that was a very long list. Then she called me to let me know I had a stalker-lite.
ETA: Librarians are AWESOME.
When I was writing my thesis, I went to get a book (my book! I’d had it like most of the previous year! I just had to return it to the library periodically so I could get it out again) and SOMEONE ELSE had taken it out. Firstly, I was pissed off (my book dammit!) and then I was excited (so excited!) that there was someone else who was interested in my tiny little field. Of course I wanted to meet them, but the librarian refused to pass a note from me on to them. Aaargh, that wouldn’t have invaded their privacy at all!
So librarians: usually awesome, but sometimes not. And I never did meet anyone else who was even vaguely studying in my field.
Sad! Sad! No compatriots in studying!
Librarians should have to uphold HIPAA-type privacy laws. Books are dangerous.
In places, privacy is upheld by law, and all librarians are expected to protect their patrons’ privacy (the ALA has written a lot on the subject: http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpret…. The exception would be in Patriot Act cases, where we can be compelled to turn over personal records.
Oh good! That’s encouraging. A++ librarians, carry on.
Librarians are good folks! No McCarthyism allowed at the library.
I’ve been interested in civil liberties issues associated with libraries for a long time.* With regard to the Patriot Act secret records requests, what kind of sad ass, incompetent terrorist is going to be taking out books on bomb-building and weaponized anthrax from their neighborhood public library?
*I eagerly followed the progress and bitterly rued the result of United States v. American Library Association as a super-cool high school sophomore.
I’m assuming this is common nation-wide, too, but in my system we don’t even keep those kinds of records. The only way a book that you’d previously checked out will even show up in your record is if you owe us money for turning it in late or losing it. Librarians be like, “Oh, you’re requiring us to turn those records over? Shoot, they literally do not exist, so sorry!”
On my library’s website, you can keep track of reading history on your own account if you want, but there’s a big disclaimer before you turn on that feature that it could be used against you. But when you turn it off, it supposedly erases the list for good.
Yeah, my mom’s library, and I think a lot of others, stopped keeping those records just so they wouldn’t have to turn them over for patriot act cases.
I work at a college library in Montana, and the reason we do not keep records of what books patrons have checked out in the past is actually that’s how Ted Kaczynski was found–his manifesto contained a lot of references to books, so the FBI subpoenaed library records all over Montana and neighboring states (by this point they had a rough idea of where he was hiding). Obviously in this situation it was a good thing they caught him, but being forced to turn over those materials and seeing how much they revealed made librarians reconsider keeping permanent records of what people had checked out. At least where I work, we stopped doing it as a direct result of that case.
Books are dangerous BURN THEM ALL
That was one punk-ass book jockey.
Hopefully I got hired for my current job because the company thought they were getting an actress who had once appeared on The Love Boat.
“”No, no. Charo Jones. No relation.”
When I first entered the working world I kept strictly mum on my personal life because it just wasn’t relevant. Slowly, as I got to know people, I shared the details with them once I’d figured out whether they were accepting or not. Eventually, my workplace threw me an awesome bridal shower when I married my wife. I have awful gaydar despite being gay so when we hired some new people I was SO SURE one of them was an awesome lesbian silver fox…she was not! We actually did hire another lesbian, and I probably wouldn’t have guessed it but she was up front about it. I think she actually introduced herself to me with the words “I hear we have something in common!”
I sincerely hope the next words out of her mouth were, “We both like deep-dish pizza! And fingerbanging women!”
I think it is equally inappropriate & unkind to ask / badger your coworkers about their sexual orientation!! it’s uncomfortable not just for bosses.
As a story for why a person who is out elsewhere may not be out at work, it became known at my place of employment that I was bisexual.
My every working day then became a parade of ignorant misunderstandings and borderline biphobia as people questioned me or outright denied that I existed TO MY FACE.
It was hell, and directly contributed to my breakdown.
I’m so sorry that happened to you.
Sometimes I love being so ungoogleable. If you search for [First Name] [Last Name], you would never see anything related to me. If you search for [First Name] [Middle Name] [Last Name], my LinkedIn profile is 7th down and everything else is people named [First Name] [Middle Name] who work at places with my last name in their title. Even if you add quotation marks to the first-middle-last search, you get my work profile and one public post I made once on my Study Abroad FB page.
My usual online handle being similarly hard to Google, I appreciate my relative online anonymity.
If you google me, you get roughly one million youngish female doctors. Are people with my name unusually likely to go into medicine, or are doctors just more likely than the rest of us to have their name all over the web?
Huh! Mine are a super diverse group — a mommy blogger, a clarinettist, an Olympic swimmer. Perhaps you just have a very doctorly name.
I get similar weirdness when I Google my name, minus middle initial. We’re all a bunch of dark-haired white women, and there’s some eerie overlap in our areas of professional interest. It would be very strange to have us all in a room together!
My name is super common so I’m a dentist, a college basketball player, or any of a number of folks, but one of the top results is firstnamelastname.com, which is the blog of a lady in my field who is much more accomplished than me (anything other than a cursory glance at it would make it obvious it’s a different person but hey, I’ll take the help).
My online handle on the other hand is me almost everywhere. It’s nice having the contrast.
I’m the only person currently alive with my Firstname Lastname combo which is something I’m very aware of, but have managed. That situation definitely contributed to me picking just a random word as a handle.
Me too. I have a random hodgepodge of news articles, facebook, old sports teams and a work thing I did once floating around under my name. Any advice for future strategies? So far I’ve just taken a fairly scattershot approach, but I don’t know how great that is.
Unfortunately I have a fairly uncommon last name and an unusually spelled first name, so when you google me all of the results are for me. Until on the second page it devolves into pages about an actress with the same unusually spelled first name and a pair of brothers who wrote fairy tales.
LW2- advice is on point. It sounds like you’ve had conversations with coworkers about her maybe-gayness? You need to shut that down, too. “Yeah, I realized that maybe it’s kind of creepy we speculate on her sexuality, so I’ve decided to stop.”
Also, it sounds like maybe you’re queer too and I get it, I really do, I get excited scoping out people in my office/life who might be queer because OMG SISTREN but that needs to stay FIRMLY IN YOUR HEAD or to conversations with people completely removed from the situation who will never meet anyone involved or a private, locked, stored-in-a-cave journal. You are not entitled to the information on anyone’s personal life, and seeking it out sends out red flags all over for most people.
Seriously. It’s way bad manners to talk about someone behind their back (ESPECIALLY about something so personal) and it creates a toxic office environment, so this needs to be nipped in the bud.
YES. Stop with the speculation. It’s really not cool. That has happened in my office before, only my Big Boss is the one perpetuating it, so it’s almost impossible for me to say, “Look, that’s creepy, knock it off.” I do a lot of not talking during those conversations because it’s the best I can do.
Oh God, I keep thinking of that very bad scene in The L Word when they all go to try to Sherlock the chef’s sexuality so Dana knows whether she can ask her out without fear of outing herself to a straight lady.
And then I remembered that I’ve absolutely done something like sorta this, even though I was kinda pissed off by LW2’s letter*, and that of the times I’ve been present for such speculation or participated in it it was usually in the contexts of closets, because the necessity of closets fucks up queer communication but something terrible. Part of it was trying to negotiate which places were safe, and part of it was trying to find other people like you.
Aw, shit. I think things have changed somewhat, but at the local level respecting an individual’s version of outness is still in tension with a lot of the social conventions involved in building a community.
I don’t know. Workplaces should be professional and personal boundaries should be respected. But I think the reason we’re even discussing this at all is because sexual identity is still, incredibly, kind of fraught. It’s not like people think twice about assuming everyone is straight, you know?
*above, somewhere.
(I mean, the only reason beyond the workplace professional/personal boundaries thing.)
It turns out I have a teenage name-doppelganger, who sadly does not have a good grasp of her email address because she keeps putting mine (which is our name) down when she signs up for things online. I recently got a twitter account with it so that I’d stop getting “please verify your address” emails from her trying to sign up for it. I had another woman with my name living a few blocks from me who worked at my bank. We were the same age, and even looked very similar. She said she had seen my name in the bank records and had made sure she used her middle initial on all her accounts to differentiate us, but it turns out we have the same middle initial. Luckily, she has very little internet presence, and there’s an actress with our name so Google mostly just shows stuff about the actress.
My email address is my last name with a well-known rhyme. I get emails for other people with my last name ALL THE TIME. For different people, who must all have the same thing but with numbers, or at yahoo or something? I dunno. I can almost never figure out where they are really supposed to go. Recently a bar opened on the other side of the country and I was able to figure out what their email address is supposed to be and I asked them frostily to CHECK YOURSELF when you give it out to people, but I got no reply and still get their stuff all the time. Grrrrrr.
ugh, I get emails meant for other people all the time. It’s one thing if people send it to the wrong address, but signing up for services with my email? Someone keeps signing up for a gmail account and listing my email as a backup address. How hard is it to know your own email address?
I’ve had my email address for almost 20 years. I constantly get spam emails for a Luke Chiccione. I’m female, feminine first name, British last name. Not even remotely close. I think it’s that my address has some numbers in it, and his email is probably 1 digit off mine. Either that or he “made up” a fake email address to give to businesses to avoid spam and has been sticking with it all these years.
I’d *really* like to know how people can not know their e-mail address. This woman used my e-mail address to sign up for appointment reminders at a local car dealership and e-mails from some uber-Republican senate candidate who sends out a ridiculous number of screeds. That e-mail address isn’t exactly something you’d accidentally typo because you forgot which e-mail service you signed up with, so I’m extra pissed.
Meanwhile, my dad gets this woman’s order confirmations from Frederick’s of Hollywood. She’s been buying a lot of expensive underwear lately, so you’d think she’d start to wonder why she never gets confirmation e-mails, but no. Do people just not… read their e-mail? If I don’t get confirmations pretty much straight away, I start getting antsy.
The trouble comes when you have a fairly common name and/or a preferred user name that you’ve used a bunch of times before, and then sign up for a new email only to discover that all your usual preferences have already been taken. So you make up yet another user name, and there you go. I’m *still* double-checking my Gmail address, because my name there broke the naming patterns I’d been using up to that point.
I have a friend who has a very common name who gets this all the time. My favorite was when someone sent him a picture of the weed plants they were growing in their garage, followed closely by the time he got signed up for a Russian mail-order bride website
There’s a doctor and professor in Finland who shares my maiden name and I think she’d put my email address in when she didn’t actually want to get the emails for a thing. I got Finnish-language advertising emails that I would have to unsubscribe from individually. Also on very rare occasion I’d get receipts for things she’d bought, and on one really odd occasion one of her students sent me the proposal for her PhD work, which I felt like I had to reply to and say “Wrong [name]!” because I didn’t want her to think her professor was ignoring her or for her to miss a deadline.
my email is firstnamemiddleinitailalastname (I also have firstname.lastname) at gmail. There is a woman who must have the same name in TN who likes to order things from Finish Line, and I get her confirmation emails. That is the only place where I get them from. The first time it happened I called the company to make sure that my card hadn’t been used for the order, and asked them to reach out to her to tell her that she had her email address wrong. Apparently this did not happen.
Arrrgh, I get tons of emails for other people with my same first initial and last name. Apparently there is a prominent civil engineer in Colombia with my name and I get emails from people working for the US gov’t every now and then trying to contact him for aid projects. I have whole email chains with one staffer who constantly gets the email address wrong and me just replying “sorry, wrong email address.” “Sorry, still wrong”, until I am just forwarding back all his emails to himself.
The most annoying was last autumn when a Peruvian law office posted my email address as the one and only contact for their office to receive CVs and cover letters for a job. I even looked into trying to call this fucking place in Lima, but they didn’t have a phone number listed, so I wound up replying to every. single. applicant. in my shit Spanish saying sorry, I am a librarian in England, but good luck anyway and can you please try and phone the law firm to tell them that they need to get their shit together? After I stopped receiving CVs, the firm reposted the job, presumably because I got all the emails, and they posted my address again! But then it stopped, so hopefully, one of those poor saps applying for a job got in touch.
LW1: Such good advice here! It would not have occurred to me to do Google+ but this is the kind of advice I come to the Toast for. I just wrote a lot and tweet a lot and the other Sulagna Misras don’t (they are too busy being doctors or engineers or some other lucrative positions that don’t give them too much time on the internet).
LW2: Don’t ask. Take the part of you that wants to ask, that thinks it’s okay to ask, and give it a very stern look until it withers away under the weight of its own guilt. The “Asking of sexual orientation” also works in the cases of religion, race, ethnicity, etc. You need to get rid of that part of you that feels entitled to this information because you are doing a disservice to yourself and to the person you want to talk to. You are reducing them to a hypothesis about yourself rather than an actual person. The hypothesis is “Am I right?” and while we all have such hypotheses in ourselves, using a person as an experiment is rude and also not very effective.
Also, if you want to be this lady’s menthe, you should come to her in a state of “Here’s what I can offer and here’s where I’d appreciate your advice” rather than “Who are you? I have a guess, can you tell me if I’m right?”
You are reducing them to a hypothesis about yourself rather than an actual person. The hypothesis is “Am I right?” and while we all have such hypotheses in ourselves, using a person as an experiment is rude and also not very effective.
THIS, SO GOOD. LW2, don’t do the thing, it’s an awful thing.
You are so kind–I’m ridiculously overwhelmed at work right now (to the point where I almost forgot this column was running!) and this comment just made a marked improvement in my day.
LW2 : Nononononononononono never ask anyone that, ever.
My name doppelganger was an assistant Secretary of the Treasury, so I get mistaken for her all the time at the airport in DC. I’ve tried to keep “our” good name clean in Google. If she gets in a scandal I will start using my middle initial
There’s a woman in the UK with my first and last name, and we are both visual artists! She’s also way better than I am.
LW2, I’ve been in a similar situation. Either it will come up eventually (one day my boss had to duck out early to pick up her kids from her ex-wife’s) or it won’t. What is a potentially SUPER AWKWARD “so are you gay or what?” conversation going to accomplish exactly, especially with someone you hope to work closely with?
Well, now I am terribly paranoid that I’ve gotten rejected for jobs because people think I’m the Christian singer-songwriter who comes up first when you google me. Although, I did totally love it when ‘paddlepicklesrealname.net’ was an all-black website with a broken heart graphic and the words “Paddlepickle Broke My Heart, 7/15/2008”
I have a name doppelganger who lived in the same city as me for a while (I moved; I suppose he did not). My doppelganger’s brother was one of the prime suspects in a very high-profile murder in DC ten or so years ago. When you google my (his) name together with “DC” (a not uncommon thing to do, as the name itself is sort of common), the very first search result is a headline screaming: “[My name] to the police: You motherfuckers got the wrong guy!”
So that was fun.
Did your brother kill Chandra Levy??
Hmm… if you Google me, you get many results for many different humans, which I am not one. I only come up when you add my school or workplace. That’s not a BAD thing right?
ETA I just Googled myself to confirm this, and one of the first results is someone with my name who works in the industry that does the opposite of what I do. Like say I worked in an anti-tobacco group (I don’t), she works for the cigarette company. HAA. And one of Google’s suggested related searches is “[My Name] fanfiction” … oof
My friend does online reputation management (i.e. burying things on the internet you cannot control) and she says the best way is to create lots of commenting profiles with your real name and make thoughtful comments on politically neutral sites that you wouldn’t mind popping up in a google search. Then, once you’ve created some, google search for them and click on them so google recognizes the tags. Or something like that, I don’t understand SEO.
LW2’s company might appear to be “very gay friendly” only to people who are not gay. That is, there’s a domestic partner package and some cheery notes in newsletters, but being out means slow motion hazing. Or she may just be a private person.
Could LW1 say, when writing job applications, “Hey, FYI, there’s someone else with my same name who has a blog – that’s not me!” (Maybe downplay the weirdness of the blog by saying it’s “semi-popular”, and that she doesn’t want the company to worry that anything that happens at work will show up on this blog.)
Good point. Even if the “gay-friendliness” is an official company policy, that’s not going to guarantee that individual employees are going to act correctly.
And sometimes, “gay-friendliness” means an environment where your heterosexual colleagues want to talk about your personal life a lot as a means of establishing that they’re queer friendly. Badgering someone about their private life outside of work is not anything-friendly.
But seriously, “we’re so gay friendly!” and “I think my boss is probably a lesbian and I want to talk to her about it so we can bond!” are actually pretty incongruous statements.
Oh yeah, if this is how the LW and his/her co-workers act, they clearly skipped a few days of Friendliness Class……
ETA: I should probably be more charitable towards the LW, but I’m not really feeling it. Don’t Gossip About People’s Sex Life and For God’s Sake, Don’t Ask Them About It is some pretty basic shit.
Your second paragraph is exactly what I was thinking. “We’re so gay-friendly here that gays have no right to set their own boundaries!”
I usually manage to come out at interview or in my first half an hour in a new job, and if someone asked me if I was gay (outside of very specific contexts like, say, turning up at the LGBT Network meeting and asking if I can join the committee), I would totally freeze and have that person down as Clueless if they were queer themselves, and Not Safe if they were straight.
I am the only person with my name, because my grandfather very creatively made up our last name when he was displeased with immigration’s spelling of his real name. Fortunately, my career-related posts have buried most things, but I am not at all pleased that a curious person can find my high school track and field scores and pictures of 13-year old me at the science fair that will apparently linger on the internet for eternity.
I am also the only person with my name, and it is SO weird to get Google hits from high school stuff.
Right? I just envision some future employer being like “woah only a 9:45 pace on that last mile in 1993, clearly this one has zero work ethic!”
I am also the only person with my name, and every time I google myself I again want to contact the admin of the homeschooling Shakespeare troupe website and ask them to take down the VERY awkward pictures of me at 13 playing Oberon and Romeo (I was taller and bigger than all the boys, but I also had big awkward 13-year-old knockers.)
If I have any name dopplegangers at all they have no internet presence.
Every result on the first two pages is actually me, and they are all totally benign. Excellent. And that’s without having to bring middle names into it.
I’m the same. Which is why I use pseuds for all my online social activity.
I am the only me on the internet, I think. Although there is an Iranian Olympic boxer (my first name is unisex and more commonly a man’s name) whose name is **this** close to mine – same first name and almost the same surname – which amuses me endlessly. I was gutted he didn’t win the gold in 2012.
There was a medal-winning skiier in the last olympics with my same last name (fairly rare in the US, fairly common in my ancestral country of origin) and I enjoyed pretending that we were actually related.
I’m also a syllable in each name away from the Iranian president!
It’s me and some woman who was a vaguely well-known athlete at school and who got an athletics scholarship. But we’re in different countries, so no-one could confuse her and me.
my dopplenamer is a now-retired professional volleyball player (which should clear up the burning curiosity you didn’t have regarding my weird twitter/tumblr/commenter name).
Hey, I have one of those, too! YOUNG BLONDE NOT-ME SURE CAN RUN FAST
What is it with school/teenage sports showing up so well on google? My youthful adventures as a competitive runner and skiier are most of what you can find about me with a quick search.
THAT IS SO COOL.
One of the things I like (and maybe future me won’t like, since I have a pretty big online footprint) is that my double-barreled surname makes me the only person with my name in the world. If you Google anything about me, all actual-me stuff comes up. My pre-married name has many doppelgangers, and while most of them seem pretty cool, I’d rather not be mistaken for them. A name doppelganger who looks somewhat like you and keeps a detailed blog is a whole ‘nother thing! I felt really perplexed reading the question and then massively impressed by Businesslady’s clever response.
My name is only mine (my last name is held by just my immediate family and one aunt), and so I’ve learned to be careful about what I put my last name to. I can’t just pretend some other [my name] said that…
One of my doppelgangers is a Southern mommy blogger who friended me on Facebook a while back, so occasionally I’ll be scrolling through the newsfeed and see something like:
MY NAME likes KENNY CHESNEY – OFFICIAL FAN PAGE
and think I accidentally clicked something and that all my friends are probably judging me.
Yeah, I had that when I was on FB, another person with my name friended me because, hey, how bizarre that we have the same name!
Except there were SO MANY people with my name. Ugh. And some of them even lived quite closeby in the same city. Well, until I changed my name, and then we moved, and then the first week I went to playgroup with the children, and the playgroup leader asked if I worked for a govt dept because there is another person with my (new) name there.
Sigh. There’s no escaping it, obviously.
I think there needs to be a new term for this phenomenon: doppelnahmer.
Googledoppel?
I’ve been on the other side of the doppelganger issue. When my boss told me we’d have a new team member joining soon, I googled my new co-worker by his full name and the school he’d just graduated from. I found loads of misogynistic tweets and photos of underage-drinking hijinks from someone with the same name and alma mater. Since I hadn’t met New Hire yet, I couldn’t tell the photos were not of him. Boss and I had some tense moments with HR before they were able to confirm that it was just coincidence. If the actual new hire had had any sort of web presence, it would have been obvious that he had an evil twin.
When I read LW2 I assumed it was a straight person interested in the *novelty* of a gay coworker, not another queer looking for family. In case A, I will say that straight people needing to ask right out of the gate if I’m gay make me really squicky inside. Yes, it’s obvious. No, you don’t need to confirm. It’ll come up if it’s an appropriate situation, probably within the first few times we talk. In fact, asking to my face during “hi nice to meet you” is kind of a red flag that we’re not going to be friends – just acquaintances.
Please don’t treat finding out someone’s gay like you just found out they’re in a band and are hoping to get into shows for free. It’s weird and opportunistic and uncomfortable.
This x 100.
Re-read to make sure I wasn’t overreacting and it’s even squickier than the first time. Jeeze, LW2. “we’re very gay-friendly so I don’t know why she wouldn’t be out” and “it would only make her cooler”??? Come on. SOME PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TO BE OUT AT WORK. It can still be dangerous even if the company is superficially “gay-friendly.” What does that even mean? Like “gay-friendly” as in your company is located in the Bay Area and you’re all 20/30-something ? “Gay-friendly” as in no one has ever said a gay slur in your presence at work?
Smdh at straight people who don’t understand why people are private about their sexuality. Plus, people can be out without coming out. The kind of official coming outs straight people expect are a ridiculous convention. No, we’re not having a party with rainbow cupcakes. I can be “out” without ever addressing it directly at work. Or when I go to the corner store. Or when I talk to my barista in the morning. Or when I see casual acquaintances, you know, like coworkers. Maybe I’m just over here living my life like being queer is just one part of it, not all of it.
If you google my first name and last name, google auto-corrects it to the more common spelling of my first name (a one letter difference) and you get tons of info about a very web-savvy librarian who actually runs the city library for the city I live in.
We do have some weird parallels but there are enough differences that it’s just something that amuses me when another weird parallel comes up (both our mothers are nurses!).
Also, I don’t actually know her, but she seems like she would read the toast, so if you recognize yourself, name twin, hello!
Thankful x1000 that google tells me I am the only person in America with my name.
WRT the online identity question, I too am one of those people who are the only person on the internet with my name. Even though I have never written my real name on my tumblr, Google somehow knows & puts it very early in the search results. It’s not an embarrassing blog, (mostly short fiction and weird vignettes about New York, occasional swearwords and cocktail recipes) but it’s not totally Professionally Consistent with my real work (But I also have a couple of pieces of writing similar to what I put on Tumblr published in other places under my real name, albeit without the middle initial I use professionally, so that’s already out there.) Right now I’m just a postdoc so I’m squarely in NO1 CURR territory, but as I get a real job is this going to be detrimental? Anyone have any ideas on HOW GOOGLE LINKED IT TO ME IN THE FIRST PLACE GOD GOOGLE WAY TO BE A JERK?
Is there any chance that this is just Google displaying results it wouldn’t otherwise show the outside world? Like if you have a hotel confirmation in your Gmail, and then use Google Maps in the surrounding area, that hotel will pop up with a note saying “reservation 8/26-8/27” (or whatever). But not everyone searching that hotel is going to see “Businesslady will be staying there tonight.”
If you click “search tools” in your Google results, there’s a tab that says “Private,” where Google displays the stuff it only knows about by being all up in your Chrome/Gmail/Maps business. If your Gmail address is linked to your tumblr (even if your name never appears there), that’s probably why it’s pulling up those results.
Disclaimer: I am a work-advice person and not a Google-advice person, so if this is entirely off-base I hope someone more tech-savvy can chime in.
Check your tumblr settings to make sure your tumblr isn’t associated with the email account you used when you join.
So…confession time: When I made my fanfiction,net account back in middle school, I was obsessed with the idea of pen names that don’t advertise themselves as pen names, and so I made up slightly weird but plausible-sounding FN-LN combination that I thought sounded nice. Later I noticed, when I googled fake!fandom!me (I’m not the only one who periodically googles their old fanfiction identities, right?) that there is one real person with that name, who works in real estate or something, but who I guess has to deal with the fact that it looks like she wrote a lot of crappy Tamora Pierce fanfiction.
Arg, that happened to me in reverse! Except that the person who (randomly?) picked my name was writing some pretty intense fetish fic. I’m grateful I wasn’t job searching at the time.
Sorry to add to the chorus and in a much less generous way, but WTFFFFFFF LW2. Like, seriously. You and your co-workers sit around and speculate about your boss, to the point where you think it might be ok to confront her about her sexuality? Because you have a better handle on the work culture than she does? Like, if you just winkle her out of the closet (that, let’s be very clear here, you have ENTIRELY MADE UP IN YOUR OWN HEAD) she will be happier, poor closeted dear queer who just needs an underling to ask her the right questions and free her from her torment? Get a grip. Jesus. I want to fire you on her behalf.
Sorry, having a GRUMPY DAY.
ETA, yeah I’m actually sorry, people should not be exposed to me when asking for advice.
LW2: You know who would be the best person to determine whether your workplace was gay friendly? A gay person.
Apparently one of my doppelgangers is a Welsh teenage distance runner. As someone who actively tried to get out of mile-running day each and every PE class, I’m weirdly proud of her.
LW2 just reminded me of all the people in/connected to the grad program my girlfriend was in not that long ago. While it wasn’t so much finding out if either of us were gay (that I had come with her to a small town on the other side of the country for the express purpose of being her moral support/domestic goddess kind of gave the game away), it was definitely in the ‘you’re GAY omg SO COOL’ vein. No, I didn’t kiss my girlfriend in front of you because I ‘honor and respect [you] as an ally’, I did it because making out with her is fun.
I had the weird experience of a coworker rudely confronting me about my sexuality at a retail job, after which I came out in the interest of never having a conversation like that again. Then a bunch of people asked me if I thought our boss was a closeted lesbian (as if I give a damn) and told me a bunch of TMI about an ex-coworker who had a baby! Via insemination! With a female partner! Wasn’t I fascinated?! It’s weird how much free time people can find when it comes to stuff that’s so completely none of their business.
Ugh ugh ugh that all sounds like the worst. I hate the formal “coming out”. I hate that people expect the formal “coming out”. Sure, as far as coming out goes, it’s a little different when you want to establish your identity as a newly-acknowledged-to-yourself-and-the-world queer person. But by the time you’ve had a few years under your belt existing as a queer person, the formal announcement is un-fun and a burden.
My last name is Born. If you google [First Name] Born, the top links are always articles about someone with my first name, born without a face.
Yeah, I had that when I was on FB, another person with my name friended me because, hey, how bizarre that we have the same name!
Except there were SO MANY people with my name. Ugh. And some of them even lived quite closeby in the same city. Well, until I changed my name, and then we moved, and then the first week I went to playgroup with the children, and the playgroup leader asked if I worked for a govt dept because there is another person with my (new) name there.
Sigh. There's no escaping it, obviously.
I have two name doppelgangers, a man and his son (I've always gone by my traditionally masculine middle name), both from my hometown. Fortunately Mister My Name Senior does super charitable things and volunteers and works for the American Cancer Society, so he's generally making all three of us look great on Google. Thanks, friend! I, meanwhile, write about underwear on the internet. Sorry, friend.
I get similar weirdness when I Google my name, minus middle initial. We're all a bunch of dark-haired white women, and there's some eerie overlap in our areas of professional interest. It would be very strange to have us all in a room together!
The trouble comes when you have a fairly common name and/or a preferred user name that you've used a bunch of times before, and then sign up for a new email only to discover that all your usual preferences have already been taken. So you make up yet another user name, and there you go. I'm *still* double-checking my Gmail address, because my name there broke the naming patterns I'd been using up to that point.
There are loads of people with my name – mostly South African girls 20 years younger than me. Which led to my mother “poking” a bunch of strangers on facebook thinking they were me.