Do You Have a Googleganger? Have You Found Someone with the Same Name as You?

First of all, what is a "googleganger"? Well, it's like a doppelganger, which is German for "double-goer", or a person who looks exactly like another person. They say every person has a double, a spitting image, walking around somewhere on the earth. Well, a googleganger is someone with the same name as another person. You can find your googleganger or googlegangers, by googling yourself. Now, come on! Admit it! Everyone does it! I do it often, I freely admit it. I publish a lot on the web, so I want to see if my name comes up readily in a Google search [it does, by the way, which delights me]. I also want to see if anyone publishes something bad about me [so far, I'm safe].

Celebrities Google themselves all the time, or at least they have people who do it for them. I once blogged about a frighteningly bad experience I had in my local hospital emergency room. I was shocked when, the following day, the public relations director emailed me to follow up. "How did you know about my experience?", I wrote back. "You wrote about it on your blog", he responded. I felt violated, almost as if this man had stood outside my bedroom window while I was undressing. Yikes! How did this man just happen upon my blog, a mere blip among the millions of blogs written by authors much more important than I? In the whole worldwide blogosphere, how did he find me? I had to ask him. I should have expected the answer I got: he and his staff Google the hospital every day to see what is published about them. This, of course, just cemented for me what I knew already: that you have to be very very careful what you publish on the web. In my case, I had published the truth, and that PR director really did follow up on my complaint.

Let's get back to googling yourself. And don't tell me you don't do it; I know you do, so stop telling me you don't. Ever wonder who else has your name? If your name is John Smith, you already know there are other John Smiths. But what if you have an unusual, uncommon name? Don't you want to find out if someone else's mom was drugged-out enough thirty years ago to come up with a name like Dweezil Zappa? Googlegangering can be humorous at times. I once worked with a Gary Cooper who was a generation younger than the classic movie star of the same name.

When I was a teenager, there was a children's TV host named Sandy Becker, the same name as a girl I hung out with, who was really Sandra Becker but called herself Sandy. And I remember going through the Brooklyn phone book at 10 years old, in search of a local John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey. My friends and I had fun calling Brooklyn's own version of Lennon and McCartney, and singing Beatle songs to them. And who can forget the Seinfeld episode when Elaine tries to convince her new guy-friend, Joel Rivkin, to change his name, because it's the same as a famous serial killer? But even though Cohen was one of the most common surnames in the local directory [the Jewish version of Smith or Jones], I never did find a Fern Cohen.

Until college, that is. I met my googleganger, and it wasn't pleasant. It was September, 1973, decades before the word "Google" was in the popular lexicon, and probably before Google's CEO was out of diapers, if in fact, he was even born. I had moved into my new suite at the State University of NY at Stony Brook. I knew my new roommate's name, but we had never met face-to-face. So when I saw another woman in the room, I held out my hand and said "Barbara, I'm Fern". The other woman said "I'm Fern". So we had a frustrating dialog resembling Abbot and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine, until I finally convinced the other Fern Cohen that this suite was mine, I was the sophomore, she the freshman, and she would have to go to the freshman hall-dorm across campus.

Her reluctant departure wasn't the last I heard of my name-double. She wasn't as good a student as I, and I almost passed out cold when I got her transcript one term, filled with C's and D's. [I was an A-to-B+ student] Then there was my trip to the infirmary for allergy medication. The nurse told me that I couldn't have the medication I was requesting because it might aggravate my severe acne. I begged her to look up from the file, and into my pimple-free, clear-complexioned face. Sure enough, the file she was holding belonged to the other Fern Cohen. Fast-forward to graduation time. I went to submit the application for my diploma. It seems the other Fern Cohen was not too responsible with library books. It took all day for me to straighten that one out, and I almost couldn't graduate.

More recently, when I Google myself, I come up with a few interesting ladies. One is a psychologist. Another is married to a Hershel Cohen. She and her husband are local philanthropists who are noted contributors to some worthy causes, mostly art-related. The third Fern Cohen is a wedding-planner, and seems to be well-known. There are several references to weddings she has planned, including a gay one between two men. And that's just in the New York area; I haven't even googled myself nationally or worldwide. Which reminds me of my trip to Nairobi, Kenya in 1988. I was tickled to find a Cohen in the phone book there, not Fern, but a Cohen in the middle of Africa! When I gave my credit card in Israel to pay for a raincoat, the cashier exclaimed "I'm a Cohen too! Maybe we're cousins!". I laughed because I probably have a million such "cousins" in Israel. In the Brooklyn phone book, I once counted 11 pages of Cohens. And I once went on a blind date with a Cohen [it was inevitable], who said "hey, if we marry, you won't have to change your name on anything!" Sorry buddy, I thought, you'll have to come up with a better reason to walk down the aisle with you!

So go ahead! You know you want to. I know you probably have already. Or go to the website http://www.samenameasme.com, and register yourself to find your googleganger. Or just google yourself. Find out who has the same name as you. Ask your googleganger if he had to endure the same embarrassing nicknames in the schoolyard that damaged your self-esteem. Find out that you weren't the only one who had to spell your name three times to a new teacher, or correct pronunciation a hundred times more. Commiserate about what your hippie moms must have been tripping on, when they picked that name you hated all through childhood, but made you suddenly cool in adulthood. Years ago, you were limited to a phonebook. But with the worldwide web, the possibilities are endless. You may never meet your doppelganger, but you may be surprised at how many googlegangers you have!