Thursday, July 15, 2010

"Should we meet?"

Every so often I check up on my name on Google. I hold out small hope that the web will have documented something amazing that I've done, or at least list several links that highlight my significant contributions to society. Usually it just comes up with my Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Which is sad because I don't think I've logged in to LinkedIn since 2008.

When I was unemployed, I created a personal web page that has since gone dead because it was hosted through my graduate university and they eventually took away my web access after I graduated. Revamping that (or at least transferring the html files to a live venue) is on my list of things to do once I have tons and tons of time because I'll only be completely responsible for the well-being of another totally dependent human.

In the meantime, I check my Google stats out of curiosity.

Today I discovered that there is another Erin Gong. Okay, I actually already knew that from a past Google search. At that time, I was surprised and disappointed - I had felt so confident in the absolute uniqueness of my multi-cultural name. Darn that industrializing China.

But things have moved to a new level. After following a few links, I found out today that this alter ego actually lives in the same town I live in (population 114,000), now attends the university I graduated from, and has some background in social psychology (my master's thesis referenced a lot of social psychologists).

Do you think we're fated to meet in the near future?

More to the point, will some future employer try doing a background check on me and find this alias self instead (reasonably thinking, what are the chances that 2 different Erin Gongs existed in the same small, midwest town at the same time?). I hope she keeps a clean record.

And maybe I'd better get that personal web site up and running.

5 comments:

Megan said...

That is too funny. Wasn't the old Erin G. from your Google search a couple of years ago a heart transplant recipient who had a touching YouTube video?

Becky and Tyler said...

Let's hope it's not someone who stole your identity!!!

Erin Gong said...

Yes, a few years ago there was a heart transplant recipient from China with my name. I'm not sure if this is the same person.

What if there are 3 of us??

More likely, this other Erin decided to use that as her Americanized name because she was inspired by the heart transplant story.

Jen said...

That's plain crazy!

Delia said...

Freaky. That is pretty weird.