Googled and Oogled

Okay, this is a petty, selfish, whiney rant. But it’s all mine.

I’m neither seven years old, nor do I have two Moms. My parents are not a lesbian couple, I’ve never lived in Louisiana, and I know how to spell “bad word” without a “u”. But none of that stops my name from coming up with all these attributes after a Google search.

See, I share the same name as seven-year-old Marcus McLaurin in Ernest Gaullet Elementary School, in Lafayette, Lousiana. He became national news when he told a classmate that his mother way gay, and a zealous teacher made him stay in from recess to write that he shouldn’t have used that “bad wurd” in November 0f 2003. As a result of the coverage, a Google search for my name will result in equal parts location of my website and some history, and Wikipedia, but mainly multiple mentions of this kids story.

What really sucks is that this happened in 2003, and it seems since then the references to the story have multiplied, while the Google references to my career and history are thinning faster than my hair. I’m there on the first page, sure, but then not mentioned again until the sixth. And let’s face it folks, how many of us look through the Google results to the sixth page?

This whole thing started because I read an article that said, as part of a job search, one should Google oneself (which sounds slightly dirty) to see what comes up. The idea being that prospective employers are likely to do so, so it’s important to be forewarned and forearmed. But the article mentions nothing about what to do if you don’t like what comes up.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I should care, but for some reason I do. In this digital age, ones fifteen minutes of fame may well be translated into fifteen bytes which seem to live forever. And right now it feels like I’m sharing seven of them with a now-11-year-old boy with two Moms who is perpetually remembered for a punishment he received four years ago. I hope America has grown up a bit since then. Okay, maybe I should, too.

I’m sure by this point he wishes all the hype would go away, or it already has, except for the news archives that Google pulls up. Maybe for him, it’s ancient history, and would be until one day someone does a Google search for him and comes across the fact that he shares his name with an Art Director in Massachusetts who sued Google to have his name legally changed on all their internet servers to “The other Marcus McLaurin.”

And lost.