It seems to come in waves: new members joining AN and using their own names as user names and their photos as avatars. Although no one truly believes that the internet is anonymous anymore, there are some very good reasons not to be totally obvious, either. AN is a very good place to come to ask questions -- especially questions you don't want to run by the crusty old bats on your unit, or to vent about your professors or bosses, or fellow students or colleagues, your patients or your family. Being instantly recognizable is not a good thing.
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It seems that every year, there's a new bunch of AN members who use their own photo as an avatar. It's a dangerous practice. The internet isn't really as anonymous as we all like to think it is, but if you're using your own picture as an avatar, you might as well use your own name as well. (And no, Ruby Vee is not my real, live legal name.)
AN is a great place to come to have questions answered -- especially stupid questions that you don't want to run by the crusty old bats who work on your unit. It's a great place to come to vent ABOUT those crusty old bats, those clueless newbies or the manager from Hades. If I come here to vent about that witch of a patient's family member who drank from the sterile saline bottle, lied about it, and then blamed the nursing staff for the horrible infection her husband got and it turns out that she reads this board because she wants to be a nurse some day, I'd be mighty glad my picture isn't up there for everyone to see. If I mention that I've seen a patient with a really rare disease, and claim it was years ago in another state and the patient was the opposite gender -- all of my colleagues would know I was REALLY talking about that patient we have on the unit right now. And if I, inadvertently or otherwise, said something controversial, objectionable or just plain disagreeable, that post would be printed out and shoved under the door of the boss's office one night. At least I'd have plausible deniability since I'm *NOT* using my own name or my own face.
I know a lot of people think they'll NEVER say anything that someone else finds ignorant, abrasive, untrue or otherwise objectionable, and therefore they're safe using their picture as an avatar. I'm here to tell you, though, that you never know what someone else may find offensive. You never know what's going to rile someone up to the point of cyber-stalking, sharing your posts with your boss (or even the one about how your husband never forgets to walk the dog when he's the first person coming home after work, and never REMEMBERS to walk the dog when you're going to be the one to walk into the house first and find the mess . . . hate to find that one printed out on our kitchen table!). You just never know. And you cannot always stop yourself -- at least I can't -- when someone posts something incredibly ignorant -- from telling them how ignorant it is.
A colleague of mine posted on allnurses about what bullies and witches all of the preceptors in our unit are, how everyone she worked with was persecuting her and how she was only going to be on the job for the minimum time possible to get into CRNA school anyway. The avatar she used wasn't her picture, but was an avatar she used for other forums and some of her "friends" at work put two and two together . . . she found herself having a chat with our manager about her extreme unhappiness with her job. I'm told it didn't go well for her. An orientee we were having trouble with posted a whole lot of impassioned venting about her horrible preceptors, her terrible boss and how sick she was of her job. She stayed signed in to AN on the nurse's station computer when she went home in the morning. The Assistant Nurse Manager was not amused when she hopped on the computer and found the vent thread . . . nor was the DON amused when she was given the print-out. Had the orientee not used her own name and a photo of her dog/car/bicycle/boyfriend/whatever that she was very proud of an had shown to all and sundry, we would not have been able to prove who posted the vitriol.
Another colleague made a long, impassioned post about how nurses eat their young, and she knows that because she's been eaten. That post was nearly ten years ago, and she looks back on it now and cringes at how ignorant she was then. Unfortunately, at some point in the interim, she either used her picture as an avatar or posted too much information because now some of her co-workers know who she is on allnurses, and were teasing her about that post the other day. On the other hand, her orientees can never claim she's forgotten what it was like to be a brand new nurse. The evidence is out there!
Be safe, guys. Take a nice picture of a creative bumper sticker or T shirt, a flower, a mountain or your old cat (not the one all of your colleagues know because it's on your locker) and use that as an avatar instead!
