Will’s View

During a particularly slow part of a recent lab, I asked someone if they had ever Googled their own name to see what came up.

Now admittedly this was on fairly selfish grounds, as I am well aware that the first result that appears when you Google my name is this website. I can only guess that this is due to my somewhat rare last name (and of course the high quality of content on this site). But I suppose that this somewhat compensates for the number of people who completely fail to pronounce or spell ‘Midgley’.

I digress. It turned out that this person was in the top four results for Australia, but ranked somewhat poorly for the worldwide results. Discussing these results loudly (yes, I do realise that I have a complete inability to control my speaking volume), one of the other people in the lab piped up and said something along the lines of: “Yeah, well I’m destined to be well down the list on a Google search, I have the same name as a famous serial killer in the states.” Hmmmm.

The most disconcerting thing was that this was said with a certain sense of achievement and pride. Apart from being a little disappointed that they didn’t come top of the results, this person was genuinely amused/pleased that they had the same name as a serial killer. Now I’m not going to go on some rant and say that the society of today is screwed up because it loves serial killers, I’ll save that rhetoric for another time, but I will say that being named after someone reasonably (in)famous could be cool.

Imagine sitting around eating lunch with your friends in the school yard when you were ten and saying you had the same name as a serial killer. That would earn you some serious credit with the mates. Admittedly being named after Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan would be slightly less cool than a serial killer, in fact it may even go so far as to be uncool.

My dad has the same name as an English chef….How cool am I? (No, he’s not called Jamie Oliver)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Humorous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.