I Am A Big, Fat Snooper

I’m a big fat snooper. I think pretty much everything is my beeswax. When I say this, I am actually referring to poking around in the big giant underwear drawer known as the World Wide Web. The internet makes it so damn easy to just FIND OUT STUFF about people. I mean, if you are going to throw your dirty laundry into that proverbial underwear drawer, then be prepared. I think I may be obsessed with Googling. It is part of my everyday vocabulary and I have inducted the word Google into my personal Verb Hall of Fame. “I’ll Google it for you.” “Oh, I need to Google that.”

And with the fast-growing personal beeswax websites such as Facebook, Yahoo Personals, AIM, and MySpace – it is just that more tantalizing. If you put stuff there, I want to know about it! And I have found some juicy stuff. I know who is looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend. Who is lying. Who has PhotoShopped their face. Who is snooping into “married but looking” sites. And it’s not as if people are advertising their activities with their full first and last name next to the web site – but through some basic information and a little detective work, it takes about five minutes for me to find out what kind of profile, nickname, or information someone might attach to said sites. Did you know that many towns have a police blotter right on the web? Forget buying the newspaper. Find out who got pulled over for disorderly conduct. Not your favorite person? Copy and paste it into a mass email. I know who has been in jail, where, and when.

So my philosophy is this… I don’t put anything on the web that I wouldn’t want posted on a bulletin board. It’s enough that someone can find out where I live, what sexual predators live in my town, how much I have paid for my house or in taxes, when I graduated high school, and any time I have been quoted and posted somewhere on the Web. That is all without me doing anything proactive. So, I guess I feel like, hey – if someone put it out there, it is for me to find out.

Is it healthier to self-examine my own motives or even my own dreams and goals – of course! But it’s not as fun. And I have this little “shit” file to go to should anyone ever cross me ;-)

*Addendum 2013  I originally wrote this post around 2006ish. It is so old that I thought using Google as a verb was new and hip AND that I made it up (I'm pretty sure I did, though, now that I think about it. Either that or Gene Simmons did - because he did invent just about EVERYTHING). Now I read this post and the Google reference, and I appear to be this dumb, pathetic girl who has been living in a cave for 7 years. Yeah, I wish.