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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Compersion!