When You Google Yourself

Phantasy Star 2 Wanted

To the right: Phantasy Star 2 (Sega Genesis).

When you Google yourself, you expect to find yourself in at least a few places that you didn’t expect to be found.

What no one expects is for some idiot to treat their blog like it’s some pre-teen’s live journal and talk about you unkindly as if no one would ever know it was you. If someone were to do that, you’d at least expect them to try and hide who you are. Like say “this guy” or “someone I know…” or “…we’ll call him Bobalicious…”. If they still used, not just your first name, but your whole legal, given name, you’d figure they’d at least have a reason to… like some kind of vendetta. Maybe you keyed their car or slept with their sister. Maybe you kicked their dog.

What if all you did was try to be polite?

A friend of mine ran into someone she used to know. During the conversation, another old mutual friend came up. She asked how this friend was doing, what they were up to, and even took down their number. She did it just to be polite, never called the number, and didn’t even think about it again until much later.

Much later, she was playing everyone’s favorite internet game: Google myself!!

When she Googles herself, she gets a lot of results from people who are spell check impaired since her name is close enough to real words. There are other people with the same name. Nothing too noteworthy…

Then she found this (all misspellings, bad grammar, etc. I kept, but the names are ***ed out):

 
“So I wonder what’s gonna happen when ********** calls my cell-phone. Will I answe it? What would we ever have to talk about. Apparently we’ve been living in the same town for quite awhile- I wonder why she doesn’t ever come downtown. ***** said she looked the same, acted the same. It would be a shame if she’d never blossomed. Maybe she just still shy. I’m terrified of talking to her”

 
She was satisfied with telling her friends about it and us all saying ‘what an ass’, but I was a bit more pissed. I wanted to call that number and give this guy something to be terrified about.

Another friend did some reconnaissance and found the blog. I left a comment. I even left a link to my blog…

 
“So I wonder what’s gonna happen when ********** calls my cell-phone. Will I answe it?”

When? Don’t you mean if? Just because she was polite enough to ask for your number doesn’t mean she’ll call it, especially if you’re posting this.

“What would we ever have to talk about.”

Life? Is there really so little that has happened to you since you last spoke that you’d have nothing interesting to tell an old friend about?

“***** said she looked the same, acted the same. It would be a shame if she’d never blossomed.”

She still looks and acts like ****. Yeah, I know, too bad she didn’t conform to the way she should look or act.

“Maybe she just still shy. I’m terrified of talking to her.”

She’s shy but you’re terrified of talking? She’s like barely five feet tall and an openminded individual. Whatever she had to say, I bet it would have been nicer than what you had to say on the internet.

Well, no need to be afraid. I’m sure she won’t be calling you now.

 
I hope he reads it. I hope it makes him blush. I hope he then links to here and sees that I talked about it in my blog. I hope he then writes a follow up post either bad mouthing me or trying to defend himself.

Never blossomed? I’m sorry that we’re not all flowers or bloomin’ onions. We’re women who come into our own, but not exclusively in ways designed specifically to appeal to your own individual male sensibilities.

Look the same? Did he expect her to have a problem with not being a six foot blonde with a paper thin tummy and mushy melons? Did he expect plastic surgery on his behalf?


Sound the same? She’s always had interesting things to say and an amazing singing voice. Who should she sound like…

Him?

And all these conclusions are jumped to because he talked to someone who talked to her.

Is the terrifying thing that he may hear about how great she’s doing? She’ll tell him all the places she’s been and things she’s done, and he’ll feel small and empty and write about it on his blog. So instead of calling her, and judging for himself how this friend is doing, make a preemptive strike online. He belittles her so he can feel better about it when she calls. If she calls. She isn’t going to call him. Why would she?

He apparently has nothing much to say anyways.

Communication Technology

So, people have a hard enough time with regular socialization skills. Now with all the tiers of communicating, it’s a wonder anyone can keep up. It’s not just technology to master, otherwise geeks would be super-pro at socialization.

First there were people communicating at social gatherings and work.

Then there was phone.

Now there is *deep breath* AIMPhoneMSNICQCellPhoneMySpaceEmailFacebookBlogRTSTextMessageForumMMORPG *another breath* -you get the idea. You figure this would ease communication. We’d be super in touch with everyone all the time. No. Because there is no way someone is going to call you to tell you something important if they can text you even if you disabled text messaging because you’re either dirt poor or got sick of getting texts of “hi :)” (or both). Even though you told them in person that you blocked texting, they forgot and they don’t like talking on the phone. They’d rather enjoy Olympic button pressing and staring at a post-it sized screen for 5x the time it would take to say what they needed to. They scoff and think that if you really cared to keep in touch with them, you would enable texting so that you’d get that one important text out of 500. And don’t dare ask them to email you, because that’s *totally* not the same thing.

I once had a boyfriend who argued with me on the phone until I downloaded an instant messaging service to talk to him. It doesn’t matter that we had cell phones, texting, and SKYPE (back when you could dial out for free). This was his most comfortable way of communicating, so I better adapt. On some level, I can understand. You can minimize the other person, don’t need to listen to their tone of voice, can play your RTS or MMORPG, have both hands to type unlike a cell phone, and they don’t know if you got up to get a bagel or pee. On the other hand, we were kind of trying to be emotionally intimate. One other advantage of online messaging is that I still have logs from these chats. That’s what I need… a record of how much I don’t stand up for myself. Hindsight is supposed to at least be softened by memory, and here I have a .txt file showing how pathetic I can be.

Sure, check your email, but make sure you have your FacebookMySpaceLinkedInRandomNetworkingThingies configured to let you know when someone sends you a message on one of these websites. But usually, you can’t read it in your email. I go into my email, see I have something on facebook, and in facebook go to my wall or my inbox… TWO separate methods of communication in ONE networking tool that tells you through email.

Woe onto you who have more than one email. I have two… one that I have had since… before it was cool. The other I got in college and has forums for jobs and places to live and alumni and dialogs on campus and stuff for sale and calls for art. It also has instant messaging built in too… so instant messaging services open and go into your email with yet another instant messaging service and texting on the cell phone in your pocket that can also ring… I’m sorry if I haven’t got around to checking my other email in awhile.

We’re not at the sad part yet. Want to know what the sad part is..? I’m part of a generation who is used to it. Sure, I set my boundaries. I’m on facebook. I’m not getting MySpace too. I’m not enabling texting for the pope- if you’re at your cell, call me!

But I’m used to it to the point where it is ingrained in me as a socializing solution to my communication shortcomings. That’s right, I sometimes look for even more alternate forms of indirect communication… Sure, I could turn around and say something to the funny and good looking guy in my IT class who I’ve thought was pretty cool since the first class (even if he does have a girlfriend but who cares it’d just be nice to communicate). Or, instead risking getting giddy and giggling like an idiot, I’d could go run, cmd, net send…

But the instructor set his boundaries. Thou shall not abuse net send or I shall disable it. Don’t make me do it.

And then people started writing batch files that sent net sends by the hundreds… and logged into other computers with remote desktop to say ‘it wasn’t me’… and flirted using poetic computer based metaphor (Oh, wait, that was just me… and him… as far as I know).

It’s ridiculous, and I realize it. I looked myself in the eye reflecting in the monitor and made a decision.

I asked for his cell number in the parking lot. *cheers* Score one for the communication revolution! At some point in the future, we will hang out and communicate outside of class- in person!

…now I just need to call it …and stop giggling at everything he says to me in person. Yes, even I- currently rated number three most confident on the compare people face book application of all my facebook friends who also have said application- can get shy. (see documentation above)

With all the additional ways to communicate and keep in touch with people, it’s true, we still don’t know how to communicate with other human beings. The opposite sex… oh, forget about that. This isn’t Star Trek you know. We don’t have the technology.

Follow up posts:
Communication Revolution: Quashed!
Wednesday Night