I Googled Myself and was Surprised at the Results

After I voted on Saturday I walked over to Monroe Market and had lunch at Potbelly. I really like their grilled chicken and cheddar sandwich. All I can say is yum.

As I was eating, I was looking at posts on Facebook. I’m not sure what prompted it but I wondered what would come up if I Googled my name. There was the usual stuff. A couple of books I worked on a long time ago when I was with the World Bank. A few other expected entries one where I volunteer.

Then one really strange and bizarre one.

It’s from a site called something like advanced background. It turns out on their site I’m listed as being 87. That I have an alias and that would be my father Jack. For some reason this site has equated us as one and the same person. The address for “us” is the one my dad lived when he was in Illinois which is close to 8 years ago.

Other investing pieces of information were the previous addresses we’d live in Illinois. One going back to when I was like 3 or 4 years old. In this case the name of the street was wrong. In another case there were two listings on the same street only one of which was where I had lived. Oh and they did have my dad’s address in Missouri but that was listed as a previous address. The phone numbers listed were correct but they were all associated with the wrong address.

There was also a possible list of relatives. That included my dad (although that doesn’t make much sense since that’s my alias), my mom (who’s been dead for ten years) and my sister-in-law. My brother was no where to be found.

I’m trying really hard to figure out just how this could have gotten so screwed up. The only thing I can think of is that I’ve ordered things on Amazon and had them shipped to my Dad’s. Usually it would be gifts for Christmas. Much easier to have Amazon ship them than to carry them on the plane. Sometimes they would be under my name if they were the gifts I was giving to people. Sometimes under my dad’s name if it was something I ordered for him. This year I ordered for my dad a White Sox t-shirt for him to give to my brother at Christmas. My dad couldn’t find anything with the White Sox in Springfield.

But that’s the only way I think this could have happened. But wow did these people get just about everything as wrong as completely possible.

I guess it just goes to show you really shouldn’t trust everything on the internet because sometimes it could be wrong. But only sometimes :-)