The older I get, the more the words of some of my grade school teachers ring in my head."This will go down on your permanent record."

Ok, they never said that. It think that is a lyric to a Van Halensong.

My life, like most of you, has been a series of turns and twists. In a previous email, I spilled my guts to you about the challenges I have faced and how I dealt with them. We all have our lives to lead and our personal set of expectations to live up to. Some of us has other people's expectations to live up to. Some of, well meaning or not, have other's people's lives to lead. More on that another time,

And the older I get, and the more degrees I completed and more responsibility I was given at work, the more I realized that my personal life and work life were hard to separate. I mean, I had to separate the emotion and the priority. When I failed to do that I almost lost my marriage and family. But my behavior in my personal life often transcended the barrier to my work life, and vice versa. As an attorney, I have to be especially careful for my behavior outside of work lest my conduct be called into question and my license (and freedom from lawsuit or incarceration) jeopardized. My wife, the beautiful doctor, needs to make certain her personal life is in check as well. Liability for her negligence could be imputed on the practice and she could lose it all.

We all have two sides to us, whether we admit it or not. What we show the world, and what we keep hidden. The problem in 2024 is that social media makes it all one world. We share with the world our inner most demons. We share what we eat, how we dress, about how many times a day our kids have dirty diapers or hit homeruns in tee-ball. We share our opinions about politics and restaurants and the neighbor's cat. We play stupid quizzes on line that are, in most cases, socially engineered to lead us to reveal personal information about ourselves. I see female friends on Facebook use their maiden name in their profiles names. Why? SO old flames can find them. So high school buddies can find them. One of the identifiers credit bureaus use to confirm your identity is your mother's maiden name. So, thank you for jeopardizing your kids' credit identity for the sake of making friends (yes, it's my opinion but it's back by stats).

And then we have these moments of lucidity when we think we can take matters under control again and demand our privacy. I know what month it is when I see Facebook flooded with people posting the same tired message about "I don't give Facebookpermission to use my likeness or information . . .blah blah blah . . . I forgot I posted pictures of my kids in the bath or that strange mole on my forehead and now I think that picture is somewhere private on the interweb . . . "

You never know where that information will wind up. Forwarded, downloaded, used by creeps, or worse, used by employers.

What do you think happens when your employer sees inappropriate comments or content on your social media profiles? What do you think happens when a workers' compensation attorney sees a claimant's Facebookpage loaded with pictures of the claimant on vacation, dancing, water skiing, exercising, and then the claimant tries to say he cannot work because his legs hurt? Doesn't jive, does it?

Was a privacy line crossed?

Are our employers taking things too far and violating some assumed right to privacy?