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The only people who have my name are:
1: A crackpot free energy antigravity mad scientist/inventor 2: A football player 3: The worst IT technician in the state of Texas
At various times in my life I have been mistaken for 1 and 3.
I was invited to (and attended) the LENREW conference in Maryland as a teenager thanks to #1, and I lost out on several pay raises and promotions (and was asked to, on my own time and dime, to drive several thousand miles round trip to Texas to pick up a mis-shipped laptop, which I declined to do) thanks to #3.
3: The worst IT technician in the state of Texas
Come on, I’m not quite that bad.
I just want to talk
I’ve got a small time lawyer in Florida. It’s nice because it overshadows anything I’ve got on the web for the most part but innocuous enough that there’s no crossed traffic or anything.
From the Google alert I have on my name I see some small time politicians but then one guy who’s been CEO at several major Fortune 500 companies. Once when I was unemployed and saw he was starting at CEO at a different company I thought it would be funny to show up the same day and see if I could get a job out of it.
Back when Facebook was cool, I searched for other people that had the same name as me and friended them. It was good. There were like 60 of us.
Over time it became clear that some of them were awful so I unfriended them. Most stopped posting. Now it’s just one other guy. He’s leading a pretty good life. It’s nice to see.
I found out i had a cousin with the same name as me, when i read about his death in the newspaper.
I did the same thing in the very early days, probably spring 2005. It quickly got confusing and I unfriended them all.
A decade to a decade and a half ago, I setup an “as it happens” Google Alert for my first and last name. As a result, every once in a while I get an email about someone with my name who’s doing much better than I am.
I have what I thought was a fairly unique name, but it turns out the combination of my first and last name is culturally common, and so while there aren’t many people with my last name, the ones that do have it often share my first name. I learned this when I looked myself up as a kid. I found a lot of us on Facebook and started a group. It was still going strong when I deleted my Facebook account.
Edit: I don’t want to dox myself, but my name is Fartin McFartface, however my friends call me Farty.
Mine is way more likely to occur in other countries than where I live, it seems.
I have run into a couple people with the exact same name as me. A couple of us follow each other on Instagram.
Searching my full name yields the results for some guy who is a PhD who is in a similar field of technology as me. I just looked and he has his own Wikipedia page now. Good for him.
I used to keep track of my namesakes, but mostly I don’t have to because they keep giving my email address as theirs and signing me up to various memberships and mailing lists. There was even one who had the same job title as me in the same city for a while.
Exactly zero people have the same exact name as me because I have a total of 5 names, 2 first names (one western one japanese) and 3 family names.
I had an online friend back on ICQ who searched for another guy with my name. I said it’s not me but we got along so well, we stayed in touch while a while, I even added my “googleganger”. At some point, we just wasn’t online anymore. Guess he moved on to MSN or something and didn’t bother to take me with him.
meow
Compersion!
