A long, long time ago I was invited to take part in a meta-writing and meta-publishing project. This was before more people knew what the internet was. It was called an APA, for Amateur Publishing Association. There were tons of them dedicated to lots of different topics.

Everything was conducted via physical mail. At regular intervals you would send in your contribution, which was a minimum number of pages of writing (or writing and art) in which you would talk about your most recent challenges or successes in your writing and publishing projects, or ask questions, and respond to things the other contributors had sent in previously.

That sort of communication tends to happen on forums and blogs, now. Not unlike blogs, each person’s contribution tended to have its own personality. Rather than just call your contribution “Gene’s pages” or “Pages from Margaret” people often named their section, as if it were a syndicated column or a separate publication. My pages in this particular project were called “From the Desk of the Script Doctor.”

“Script doctor” comes from the movie and theatre industry. A script doctor or script consultant is a writer who is brought in to rewrite an existing script. Sometimes they call it “polishing.” Usually the script doctor is just fixing problems with structure, or pacing, or dialog before a script goes into production. Usually the script doctor is a more experienced writer who has gotten a reputation for being good at significantly improving a script while staying true to the original spirit of the story.

As a fiction editor, that’s what I’m particularly good at. I’m horrible at copy editing. I read right through all sorts of typos without them bothering me, for instance. But figuring out where your characterization is going off the rails, or finding holes in your plot and suggesting fixes, and similar things, I’m really, really good at.

So I used that as the recurring name of my contributions in that APA. And when I was invited to join another writing APA, I used the same name over there. Years later, when I started blogging on LiveJournal, I used the name there, and so on.

When I first set up my twitter account, for the short bio I wrote something like, “A script doctor reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.”

My account all set up, I searched for and followed a few people. As most folks setting up a casual account do, I followed several real life friends that I knew were using Twitter. When I checked my account later, I wasn’t surprised to see that the friends had followed me back, along with one or two other friends whose accounts I hadn’t yet found.

The next day, there were a bunch of followers, almost none of whom I knew. The really odd thing was that they were mostly business accounts, mostly local, and all related to medical equipment or services. I clicked on one of the unfamiliar accounts that didn’t look like a business, and the bio had a URL for his private medical practice in a neighboring city. “That’s odd,” I thought.

The next day, the number of medically-related business or consultant accounts following me had doubled. And then I realized what was going on. Whoever was running these accounts was doing dumb searches on the keyword “doctor” and following every account that popped up.

I went through them all and blocked the ones whose streams consisted of nothing but advertisements for their business. Then I changed my bio to “A sentence wrangler reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.” I figured that would take care of the spammy medical-services related accounts, right?

As time went on I got a lot of the obvious spambots following me, as well as the slightly less obvious spamming accounts for businesses or services. Don’t get me wrong: not all business-related twitter accounts are spammy. But there are a lot out there where the person running it just doesn’t get it. They either never post anything at all, or they post virtually the same statement again and again with a link to their business web site or an article about some service they offer, or they post random quotations/words of wisdom with a link back to their company website.

I really crack up at that last one. There either must be a manual out there “Tweet Your Business for Dummies” that tells people to download a giant list of these quotations and several times a day copy one out of the list, then tweet it with your link.

But I digress.

All those other kinds of thinly disguised advertising accounts follow me, yes. However, even though all mention of my old “script doctor” joke had been removed from my bio and any other information I see on my account, it was still the case in the following months that about four out of every five of these spammy accounts that followed my account were a medical services-type business.

Even now, when my profile reads “A typographer and sentence wrangler writing, dabbling, publishing, and analyzing in Seattle”, and when I’ve replaced my avatar with a cartoon unicorn, they still come for me.

What’s happened is that these accounts aren’t being set up by someone who is doing a manual search of twitter bios. Instead, during that week or so that my bio had the phrase “script doctor” in it, some data aggregator recorded my account into a database, along with the keywords it was searching for that it found in my information. And now, I’m in that database as a doctor forever.

My day job(s) have included being responsible for managing documents or contents for about 25 years, now. I understand from personal experience that one of the least pleasant tasks is to go through older metadata and clean it up. For example, when we released that new product in 1990, all of the documents that went along with it were applicable. When we released a newer version later that year, several of the documents were replaced with newer versions, but several of the previous version’s docs didn’t need updating, so they weren’t marked as superseded. As time goes on and more products are added along with new versions of old products, and as the business grows and more employees come along, you keep adding docs and no one has time to go back to comprehensibly review all the older data on documents that no one has touched for years.

So I understand that I’m forever going to be listed in various lists—as companies share, acquire, or otherwise mix their data together—as a doctor. One wonders if there are also databases that list me as a unicorn, now.

Tempts me to find excuses to put other words in the bio. I’ve always liked the job title, “Emperor.” What do you think?