Googling yourself
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
OK, I don’t know if I’m the only one who does this on a regular basis or maybe I’m the only one who’s stupid enough to admit this, but I have a serious problem—yes, in addition to my fascination with Posh Spice and Katie Price, a.k.a Jordan:
I Google myself a lot. Like daily. I suppose it could be worse. I could be addicted to those silly gossip sites.
While I’m super psyched that the first “Kathy Ritchie” to pop up in a Google search is moi, I started thinking a lot about the other Kathy Ritchies out there. Take Kathy Ritchie of Ritchie Secretarial Services, for instance. Girl gets a lot of play on Google and Google Images. Like, there are seriously 10 images of this chick and only one of me—courtesy of SMITH and that dude in Bryant Park who took my picture.
Anyway, this whole Googling me, I mean Kathy Ritchie, got me wondering who else shares my name and what’s their story?
A quick rundown of just some of the Kats’ out there:
There’s a Kathy Ritchie from Rhodesia (or is it Zambia?) living in Canada.
A Kathy Ritchie, Ph.D—no big shock there, the name Kathy Ritchie simply oozes intelligence.
A Kathy Ritchie from Indiana who is renovating a public library.
ABC7 News interviewed a poll worker named Kathy Ritchie in Redwood City, CA.
Kathy Ritchie, a mother of four and volunteer for the San Lorenzo Valley School District.
Kathy Ritchie the dart player. She won $300 in a Women’s Singles Tournament!
Kathy Ritchie, author of the book, Decorative Painting: Fruits, Vegetables, and Berries.
So, who shares your name on Google?
I, too, practice the daily masturbatory google search. But I am every mofo-ing Rachel Fershleiser out there. Which probably means I should stop writing so much about topless photos, herpetic crushes, and fluid-soaked nightie returns.
While I am most of the results for my name, the first result is a man (I am not a man) missing from hurricane Katrina. The others are probably men too. My name is very unpopular, one is on a list for a family reunion and the other is on a list of birthdays for a Methodist church. No pictures.
There aren’t a heckuva lot of Cree McCrees out there, so I plead guilty to most of them being me. Google does occasionally turn up kindred Crees, however, like the one I happened on today: 80-year-old Cree Forman, who was “a timekeeper with the Smith-Corona Typewriter Company in Syracuse, New York” before she retired to North Carolina and penned a lovesong to her husband, ‘Phil and the French Country Inn.’ Typewriter timekeeper – now that’s a profession from another time.
Not too many google searches actually give back self esteem raising results for a girl named “Tyler” (which is why I go by my middle name, Jhenne)
I’ve been a major sports player, a firefighter with his own website, and about three dozen White teenage boys on Myspace.
So far, there haven’t been any turnups reading “Wonderfully brilliant, witty, pretty, creative, artistic, flirtatious, and graciously modest female”
Still, that doesn’t stop me from trying.