My past is haunting the Internet, help!

August 27, 2010 8:08 PM

A juicy, confessional article I wrote years ago, before the Internet, has been referenced, quoted, and even reprinted online without my permission. Will this hurt me with potential employers? A blizzard of special snowflakes after the cut.

About 15 years ago I had the opportunity to break into the writing world; this was before the Internet, and I was young, and I didn't have the foresight to think that EVERYONE might be able to read this personal essay someday. I also didn't think I'd ever be looking for an ordinary "day job," because, of course, I was destined to be A Writer.

So when college friends said they were editing a book of edgy, countercultural essays for a small press, I was like, "cool, here's my breakthrough!" and submitted an essay that had to do with some very personal insecurities and a stint of work that involved nudity which I did to bolster my confidence.

I had a pseudonym picked out, but somehow the essay was published under my real name. It's been so long that I don't even remember how or why that happened.

The original publisher, without my permission, allowed my essay to be excerpted in full from the original anthology and republished in, of all things, a college textbook.

Various students and scholars have since analyzed, referenced, and quoted my essay in their works, which have ended up online. I realize this is kosher and I've done it myself. I know it's not plagiarism. The point is that my original publisher did not have my permission to have my essay reprinted, and the reprint is the source of all this publicity, which I find embarrassing. If you Google my real name, amid all my more innocuous publications, these references come up which, frankly, make me look like a longtime sex worker, especially to someone not reading very carefully (like, say, an HR manager screening potential employees). And I'm not crazy about the vulnerabilities I wrote about being out there for anyone to read.

Worst of all, a complete stranger for some reason reprinted the entire thing on their blog on a popular social networking site. I contacted my original publisher, who said they would contact the blogger to remove it, because it is copyright infringement. This was just a few days ago and I haven't heard the outcome yet. The publisher said they were going to have me sign some paperwork for rights reversion, too. I will definitely follow up on this next week to give them time.

I'm looking for jobs now that pay the bills and I'm quite concerned that this will screw my chances of getting one. I'm still looking for writing jobs, but more business-oriented ones; but I'm also looking for non-writing jobs I'm qualified for. I know it probably wouldn't affect me for journalism or academia, but that's not where I'm trying to go, career-wise.

So, am I worrying needlessly? Would potential employers see this in a negative light if they Googled me?

Is there any kind of damage control I can do, at all? Like use Reputation Defender?

Should I change my name?

Should I join the social networking site the blogger is on just so I can send them a private mail on the site to cease and desist just in case the publisher can't get through?

Or should I, as one friend suggested, write another essay about this whole publishing mess, and about how I feel more "exposed" than ever? Or would that just add fuel to the fire?

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (13 answers total)

Well, if you don't have a super unique name, I don't think it matters at all.

If you do, and your worried, you can maybe mention that you used to write fiction and some of it has made it onto the web. It doesn't really matter that it wasn't fiction or that it might have been published as autobiographical... and I wouldn't maybe sign your name to anything that said "I wrote this fictional story here," but you I think can get away with acting as though it were fiction.
posted by brainmouse at 8:19 PM on August 27, 2010

Is there anything in the references to your essay online that indicate that you're the author? I mean obviously it's your name, but lots of people have the same name, right? Are people quoting some part of the article that gives information/details that would be fairly unique to you? If not, presuming what you're doing now is pretty different from what the article is about, most HR people would likely assume that this is a case of two people with the same name. I mean obviously the Anon Ymous who wrote the essay is a writer and sometimes nude person and you are a business-y-type-person.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:22 PM on August 27, 2010

You don't want to work anywhere that wouldn't hire you because of something like that. No, seriously, you don't. People can say "oh it tells me about their judgment" but that's bullshit. at the end of the day it's something on the internet and it's from a long time ago.

Anyone so uptight that they would use that essay to disqualify you as a potential hire (and again I'm not sure what that would prove to them) is not someone to work for. If you're looking for jobs as a business writer, how does this essay disqualify you from getting a job as a writer?

I wouldn't write an essay about it.
I wouldn't even mention it. At all.

Seriously. There is fake stuff about me on the internet that said I did things I didn't do, was in places I wasn't, committed alleged crimes i didn't, was allegedly arrested, drunk in public, all sorts of bullshit. I used to lose sleep over it and then I decided that if a company chose to not hire me because they found in a google cache a story from 12 years ago on an internet message board by someone with a username of fuzzymonkey43 claiming that they saw me get arrested for being drunk and belligerent in a bar in reno, well, that isn't a place I want to work anyway.
posted by micawber at 8:26 PM on August 27, 2010 [11 favorites]

Should I change my name?

Yeah, if you can easily do so. For instance, I have a common first and last name but an unusual middle name (let's call me John Weirdname Smith). I usually put John Weirdname Smith on my resume, but if I were in your position, I'd change it to John Smith or John W. Smith. You could also use a nickname. This is very common and respectable: people like Al Gore and Joe Lieberman aren't using the names on their birth certificates -- they like "Al" and "Joe" because it makes them seem more down-to-earth. You could just think of it like that: go with a nickname (or, if you usually use your nickname, switch to your birth name) for a different style and, while you're at it, avoid being connected to those webpages.

Is there any kind of damage control I can do, at all?

There have been many AskMe threads with people asking, "How can I get this thing about me not to show up in Google?" The answer I've always seen is, "You can't; the best you can do is create a lot of new content with your name and hope it pushes the bad webpages down in the Google results."

It's hard to give advice on an issue that completely revolves around your specific name, without knowing anything about your name. If your name is Emily Jones ... you might be worrying about nothing.
posted by jejune at 8:30 PM on August 27, 2010

, I'd change it to John Smith or John W. Smith

I do this too, in order to keep my dayjob and my film career separate. My dayjob resume is just [firstname] [lastname], which is completely perfect because any google results about me are buried deep beneath the five-plus mildly famous people who have my same name.

But for movie stuff I use my middle initial, which is also perfect because it lets people actually find me on google and imdb.
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:41 PM on August 27, 2010

An essay you say? If I were in your shoes, I don't think I would be as concerned as you seem to be.
posted by Theloupgarou at 9:28 PM on August 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'm with micawber and the folks who've said that it would probably be chalked up to two people with the same name.

Not to mention that there are a lot of people out there who've written about their experiences with sex work. I don't think they've been blacklisted from ever being gainfully employed, like, For All Time. Unless you are seeking employment in an extremely conservative context where your having any sort of "past" at all would be a career-ender, I wouldn't worry about it.

Frankly, even separating out two different versions of your name, one with your middle initial and one without, is sort of silly unless your goal is to lie and pretend you didn't really write that. For one thing, a search is going to turn up John Q. Smith and John Smith. It's not really hiding anything. And for another, unless you have some serious Jedi skills, you can't make everyone always use the initial in your desired context, without fail - even people like Angela Y. Davis are often simply called Angela Davis.
posted by Sara C. at 10:56 PM on August 27, 2010

Could someone find your essay and misinterpret it, costing you a job? Sure. Could someone not like the color of your eyes and not give you a job? Also yes. People are arbitrary.

But most employment background checks are not about reading your creative writing that turns up on Google, but rather checking to see if you have ever murdered an entire class of schoolchildren before.

I have been in a position to screen candidates before. I may Google them, but often not (and I'm a programmer), and if someone wrote an essay that talked about their sex work career, I wouldn't really care if they were qualified for the job. If the writing were good, I would actually be excited to finally be working with someone that could come up with an idea and write it down in some sort of comprehensible way. That is a rare skill, these days.

Anyway, you can worry, or you can not worry. You will get a job either way.
posted by jrockway at 11:20 PM on August 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

Honestly, if I were hiring I would be pretty dead impressed that someone's essay ended up in a college textbook.
posted by wayland at 11:26 PM on August 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'm afraid that I don't have much of use to offer, but I wanted to comment on this:

The point is that my original publisher did not have my permission to have my essay reprinted, and the reprint is the source of all this publicity, which I find embarrassing.

Since you're talking about rights reversion, I'm assuming that you signed a contract with the publisher. If you did, the odds are reasonably good that the publisher did, in fact, have your permission--in the form of the original contract--to allow the essay to be reprinted in the textbook. Many boilerplate contracts grant the publisher primary and subsidiary rights, which effectively covers pretty much anything they'd care to do with it--reprints, inclusion in anthologies, foreign translations, audiobooks, whatever.

That said, I really think you're overthinking this. Most places will probably blow it off as two people with the same name, and those who don't probably won't really care all that much. If everyone who said embarrassing things under their real name on the internet was unemployable, the unemployment rate would be a hell of a lot higher than it is.
posted by MeghanC at 1:11 AM on August 28, 2010

I don't think that Googling a potential employee is that common, certainly not for regular every day jobs. If you were applying for a particularly visible position in a company that might be different. Corps don't trust the internet for the most part.
posted by Vindaloo at 4:33 AM on August 28, 2010

I think you should embrace it. It was a part of your life, you're evidently a good writer and your work got published, people are still reading and finding it relevant to their lives - 15 years later! That's amazing! Be proud! Revel in this and take the opportunity to write some more (if writing is still an interest). Own it! :)

And, if you're worried about jobs, either don't work for anyone who's going to judge you instead of realizing what a talent you are or if any questions come up, blow it off as someone with the same name as yours.
posted by vivzan at 7:26 AM on August 28, 2010 [4 favorites]

I hire people for corporate writing work. I google them before I hire them. First thing you need to know...if your essay isn't showing up on the first page of google results for your name, it basically doesn't exist. Relax and ignore it.

Second thing you need to know, if it's not showing up in the top five results, it barely exists. It's only going to be noticed if it's the first substantive thing about you that's showing up.

If it is in the top five results, you probably want to consider pushing it down the page. It probably doesn't matter, but in this economy blah blah blah...

First thing to do is create a LinkedIn profile if you haven't already. This is the corporate-approved social networking site, and it takes maybe half an hour to fill out. If I'm checking out a potential employee I'll go here, basically checking that the information matches what's on the resume, that they aren't publicly trashing a previous employer, and aren't advertising a side business in recreational consciousness altering.

Second, create a facebook profile and set everything to private. This is what I expect to see, because this is where the employee is presumably publicly trashing a previous employer and/or describing their recreational consciousness altering habits, and I'm mostly ensuring they have the basic judgement to keep that stuff off the public web.

Third, consider getting a vanity URL. A one-page website with a bare-bones bio and links to writing samples will be plenty to keep me occupied for five or ten minutes, at which point I'll have run out the allotted time to be spent Googling you, and check that off my to-do list.

If these basic steps don't work, and the headline showing up on Google is unambiguously salacious, like "Sex worker Anonymous describes her harrowing escape from a crack addiction", then you should probably put a bit more work into bulking up your online presence. Sign up and use Twitter, build a blog, make bland comments on a professional forum using your own name, make bland comments on an innocuous hobby forum using your real name, etc. etc. Once the potentially alarming result is out of those top five, and you've got lots of non-alarming, corporate-friendly content for the curious potential employer to explore, you're home free.

Bottom line: if it takes more than 15 seconds of concentrated effort to find the link on Google, it doesn't exist, if you have to open the link to discover anything interesting, your story might as well be written in code.
posted by psycheslamp at 2:06 PM on August 29, 2010 [3 favorites]