I sometimes wonder whether I am the real David Bradley after all…I mean lots of people ego surf, don’t they and find their alter egos? Job hunter Alec Brownstein proved the point when he recently exploited this fact to get himself a job in the advertising industry by posting Google Adwords that pointed to the names of the creative directors at the big companies.

When I first searched for my own name online back in the day, there were few of my namesakes to find as there were few of anyone’s names on the net. But, I have ego surfed more recently and was shocked to find that not only do I have a namesake in a tractor company, a professional photographer, but a gay porn star. Of course, as a blogaddict, I couldn’t do anything else but blog about my findings here.

However, one doesn’t have to ego surf to discover that other people share one’s name. I get so many misdirected emails where the sender has missed out a number from the end of the username before the @ sign. Somehow, a Los Angeles Lexus show room thinks I ordered a car from them, recently. Sadly, I’m not quite in the market for a Lexus and LA is a little far to go for vehicle servicing, anyway. Another correspondent was convinced that I’d placed an order for something unmentionable, it may have been nothing more than a guide spam email, but it seemed to have a genuine shipping address for another David Bradley with a quite odd fetish…

Most worryingly, is that I discovered another namesake in the village in which I live when I started getting confirmations for bookings at a rather swanky hotel in Scotland. I’d have loved to have taken the room, but was busy that weekend, so I forwarded the email to my village namesake and asked him to check the settings in his email program. Turns out he had set it up wrong and forgotten the trailing number associated with his username.

I almost got a freelance job recently, when a commissioning editor from a major publishing house contacted me offering work in a field almost related to science and technology writing. They suggested that my expertise fit their requirements perfectly and that I’d been recommended by their senior colleague Mary X. Well, I do know someone of that name, but not at that publisher, and when the contact provided more details of the job it became immediately obvious that I was not the David Bradley they were after. Unfortunate, really as rate of pay for the job would have been almost good enough to make that trip to the LA Lexus showroom more worthwhile.