I’m in Michigan right now. Hot, humid, flat, skinny tree’d, built Ford (or GM, or Chrysler) tough, crickets chirp at night, everything is a half hour drive away, Michigan. I was born and raised here, but moved to Seattle for college, where I fell in love with the Emerald City and got a pretty sweet internship-turned-job working at the Moz Plex. Still, like a good daughter/sister/niece, I try to visit the Mother Land once or twice a year. And these visits, my lovely readers, have gotten increasingly confusing and complicated after I started working for SEOmoz.
Sure, SEO is a tricky concept to grasp if you’re not in our industry (unlike saying “I’m a doctor,” or “I’m a teacher”), but generally people can get the gist of it. I, however, have the futile task of trying to explain to my relatives what I do for a living every time I come to visit. These are blue collar folks originally hailing from Tennessee, Kentucky, and other parts of America’s Heartland. People who send me emails with ridiculous fonts and giant emoticons. People who forward me the same six damn chain letters I’ve received since I was thirteen years old. Basically, it’s an uphill effort.
The last time I was in town, I had the following exchange with my aunt:
My aunt: “So what do you do now, Rebecca?”
Me: “I work for an Internet marketing company.”
My aunt: *blank look*
Me: “Um, so…have you ever searched for something on Google?”
My aunt: *blank look*
Me: *sigh* (thinks to self: damnit, that’s usually a good segue…)
And this is usually what my Mom says:
Anyone talking to my mom: “What does Rebecca do?”
My mom: “I don’t know. Internet something. (Note to Mom: technically, Internet porn is *something*, so you might want to try and clarify a wee bit.) They must like her, because she travels a lot.” (Either that, or I have a debilitating body odor, and the conferences are a good excuse to get me out of the office so they can air out the Korean funk.)
Anyway, imagine my surprise during this trip when the typical “Rebecca does something with computers” mentality changed. A couple days ago I went to a family birthday party. All of my relatives were in attendance, including some I haven’t seen since I was a little girl. As soon as I walked in and said hello, one of my uncles said, “Hey, did you hear the news?” I shook my head, and he proceeded to state very facetiously, “Yahoo! bought Google!”
I was confused, not because I believed him (my exact response was, “If anything, it’d be the other way around”), but because I was wondering why he was telling me this. Did my uncle actually understand my line of work, and thus think that I’d be compelled to blog about something that newsworthy? Does he read the blog?! Holy crap, I underestimated my relatives!
That, unfortunately, was not the case. A short while after that exchange, one of my cousins came up to me and said, “Hey, so I hear you’re working for Google!” At that point, it clicked. Somehow, in all of my and my brother’s attempts to enlighten my relatives about search engine optimization, my family heard “blah blah blah GOOGLE” and interpreted it to mean “Rebecca works for Google!” (I think the “Have you ever searched for something on Google” is what’s really hurting me here.) I tried to explain to my cousin that no, I didn’t work for Google, but once I started to clarify his face fell and he looked sort of disappointed. I guess SEOmoz isn’t shrouded in the same sort of mystique as the almighty, all powerful Google. Sorry, Rand.
By the end of the day, I got tired of seeing faces go from excited to bored, so whenever anyone asked me if I worked for Google, I just mumbled a “mmmyeah, hey, is that fruit salad?” and ambled off. Even my mom and aunt fell victim to the Google ruse:
My aunt: “So what does Rebecca do? She works for Google?”
My mom: “Yep.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is: Damn you, Google. You’ve even monopolized my job title. The least you could do now is get me on your payroll in order to really sell the facade. 😉
