Thursday, July 13, 2006

My problem with myspace

The career services office at my school recently reminded my fellow students and me that potential employers, in addition to reading our cover letters and resumes, might research us on the internet. They warned us to clean up any myspace accounts or blogs that might place us in an unfavorable light.

I don't have a myspace account, and I'm pretty anonymous here. Someone truly dedicated, like a stalker, could probably figure out who I am, but a potential employer would be unlikely to put in the required effort. Anyway, there's not much here that's embarassing.

So what's the problem? When you google my name (in quotation marks), you get eleven hits. Ten of them are me--my name is unusual. These hits all correspond with my resume in a way that would say to an employer, "There's only one Scarlet Panda in the world." One of the hits, however, is a myspace page that belongs to the world's only apparent other Scarlet Panda. In addition, the google listing for this page shows a, shall we say, "off-color" poem involving my (her) name. I will not repeat the poem here. Those who know me (or any stalkers) can find it for themselves--you have to click on the Google's "cached" version to see the whole thing.

I find this upsetting. What can I do? Can I sue someone? Get my own myspace page so that it's obvious there are two of us?

3 comments:

Amanda G. said...

It seems everyone in the Panda/Fuzzy family has a counterpart overseas. Mine is a respectable Rabbi. Yours is a wild child. The google search result is deeply upsetting. I don't know what you can do.

Matt said...

Not particularly relevant to the post, I just wanted to say welcome back.

Nell said...

Since she is British maybe thats enough to tip off would-be employers. It seems like it would be pretty obvious that you're home grown.