I thought I knew my wife. After nearly 36 years of marriage, I thought I had a pretty good picture of who she was. I had met her family and friends. I knew what foods she liked, the types of clothes she preferred. I knew the jobs she had, the pastimes she enjoyed and the TV shows she watched. But the composite view I had of her was obviously lacking. Or as Jess Rothenberg wrote in her book "The Catastrophic History of You and Me," "No matter how much you think you know a person — no matter how pretty they act, or how popular they seem, you can never know what their lives are really like."
Turns out I didn't know my wife's stance on chickens.
Like many, I occasionally will type our name into a search bar to see what comes back. What pops up depends on a number of factors. To be sure, the linchpin is the name itself. Typing in "Bill Smith" results in 1.2 billion hits, from a well-known musician (jazz clarinetist who played with Dave Brubeck) to a famous engineer (the father of Six Sigma) to an assortment of high-level corporate types. On the other hand, typing in "Adele McGillicuddy" finds one woman in Canada who posted about a lost cat. In that continuum, we're closer to the cat than the clarinetist.
The other factor relates to something about you or something you've done. An online mention of that gets scraped into the vast maw that is the internet. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic or earth shattering, just public enough to rate a notice. It might be a readily available record like a house sale or a family member listed in a graduating class. Maybe you've posted a photo online or given money to a charity. Or perhaps you've been quoted in a newspaper article or a press release. All you need do is post your recipe for Cap'n Crunch Brownies, and the net makes a note.
The Venn diagram of your name and something related to it produces a listing that shows up for all to see. For most, those hits are innocuous, and produce a voyeuristic thrill that the world is watching. Of course most people outside of our own families don't look, or even if they do stumble across it, don't care. The hitch comes when that first tick point – your name – matches another. Then surprising things can be attributed to you, but not "you" you. The closer you are to the clarinetist, the more lost in the noise it gets. But the closer you are to the cat, and it can produce the confusion that I had about my spouse.
Putting our last name and her first into the search bar produced a top of the chart hit from the Waterloo/Marshall Courier newspaper in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. They recently ran an article about how the Planning Commission voted against a local ordinance which had garnered more than 200 signatures to allow residents to raise chickens on their properties. Opposing the petition was my wife. Or at least someone with the same name as her. Per the article "'Our community is different in the sense that we have a waterway,' commission member Susan Wollin said. ‘We cannot let manure fall into our drainage.'"
I think I can speak for our family in that while I didn't know where my wife stood on chickens per se, I know where she stands on clean. She's for it. And so it certainly sounded like it something she could have said. Coupled with her many years of service in various public capacities, it was not beyond the pale that she could be involved with community planning. The only issue was that it was in a town a 15-hour drive west of us, so even those walks she's been taking during the pandemic would not have gotten her there and back without us knowing.
Indeed, her identity doppelganger is likely similarly confused by the things my wife does which make the internet cut, both professionally and personally. No real matter: none of it rises to the level of concern. However, while she tends to favor salads, fish and vegetables, I did note that her name is also attached to a recipe for Pizza Meat Loaf Cups. But which Susan? I wonder what's for dinner.
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford isn't hard to find online. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Turns out I didn't know my wife's stance on chickens.
Like many, I occasionally will type our name into a search bar to see what comes back. What pops up depends on a number of factors. To be sure, the linchpin is the name itself. Typing in "Bill Smith" results in 1.2 billion hits, from a well-known musician (jazz clarinetist who played with Dave Brubeck) to a famous engineer (the father of Six Sigma) to an assortment of high-level corporate types. On the other hand, typing in "Adele McGillicuddy" finds one woman in Canada who posted about a lost cat. In that continuum, we're closer to the cat than the clarinetist.
The other factor relates to something about you or something you've done. An online mention of that gets scraped into the vast maw that is the internet. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic or earth shattering, just public enough to rate a notice. It might be a readily available record like a house sale or a family member listed in a graduating class. Maybe you've posted a photo online or given money to a charity. Or perhaps you've been quoted in a newspaper article or a press release. All you need do is post your recipe for Cap'n Crunch Brownies, and the net makes a note.
The Venn diagram of your name and something related to it produces a listing that shows up for all to see. For most, those hits are innocuous, and produce a voyeuristic thrill that the world is watching. Of course most people outside of our own families don't look, or even if they do stumble across it, don't care. The hitch comes when that first tick point – your name – matches another. Then surprising things can be attributed to you, but not "you" you. The closer you are to the clarinetist, the more lost in the noise it gets. But the closer you are to the cat, and it can produce the confusion that I had about my spouse.
Putting our last name and her first into the search bar produced a top of the chart hit from the Waterloo/Marshall Courier newspaper in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. They recently ran an article about how the Planning Commission voted against a local ordinance which had garnered more than 200 signatures to allow residents to raise chickens on their properties. Opposing the petition was my wife. Or at least someone with the same name as her. Per the article "'Our community is different in the sense that we have a waterway,' commission member Susan Wollin said. ‘We cannot let manure fall into our drainage.'"
I think I can speak for our family in that while I didn't know where my wife stood on chickens per se, I know where she stands on clean. She's for it. And so it certainly sounded like it something she could have said. Coupled with her many years of service in various public capacities, it was not beyond the pale that she could be involved with community planning. The only issue was that it was in a town a 15-hour drive west of us, so even those walks she's been taking during the pandemic would not have gotten her there and back without us knowing.
Indeed, her identity doppelganger is likely similarly confused by the things my wife does which make the internet cut, both professionally and personally. No real matter: none of it rises to the level of concern. However, while she tends to favor salads, fish and vegetables, I did note that her name is also attached to a recipe for Pizza Meat Loaf Cups. But which Susan? I wonder what's for dinner.
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford isn't hard to find online. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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