The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

In re: the discussion of blogging and career, Cedric Manara sent me an article that mentioned how an otherwise qualified law student lost a judicial clerkship because of something on the Internet a background search turned up. There's nothing from the article that said it was a blog; rather the article suggests it might have been some other injudicious piece of writing by him that just happened to show up in Internet archives.

It's this kind of thing that's probably a greater danger to reputation than a blog (at least a blog like this one). Here I'm fully aware of how what I say now will be captured "on the Internet" and consequently can maintain finer control over what that never-forgetting brain can see. Where people are getting bitten is in all the innocuous things they posted in 1994 without realizing how permanent they were going to be in this publicly available memory.

For me, the first page of results in Google for my name pulls up my blog at the top (as it should be...), my old homepage second, posts that I did for De Novo (interesting), a post I made in 1998 to a mailing list (this is exactly the kind of thing that can come back to haunt you, since when you write to lists like these you don't expect the posts to last forever - or at least back then you didn't - but fortunately the worst thing it reflects for me is slightly poor grammar), and a page referencing me about a project hosted on the website of the project leader.

What's of greater potential concern, however, is the result that's tucked in between all that: a website result for a completely different Cathy Gellis. Now, I'm sure this kind of thing happens all the time for the John Smith's of the world. But Cathy Gellis is a unique enough name that you wouldn't expect there to be more than one. Plus, when you look further into it, you won't readily notice clues that we're more than one person: she lived in California, she's around my age, she's on record as having attended Star Wars premiers (as a geek in Silicon Valley I did go opening night once...), she hangs around colleges, and she likes football. Plus she has the same middle initial.

As it happens, I know there has been at least one person who, when googling, thought she was me. Which raises an interesting problem: for all the talk about not ruining your own reputation on the Internet, what happens if someone else ruins it for you? Now, this hasn't happened to me. None of her results indicate anything remotely unsavory on her part. (On the contrary, she sounds exactly like me...). And given that most of the results for "Cathy Gellis" on the web do actually refer to me, if anyone is likely to be affecting anyone else, it's probably me affecting her.

Still, I do find myself hoping that she gets married and changes her name so that I can have mine all to myself...