I’m not THAT Jennifer Alvey, Either

Well, she’s at it again. One of those other Jennifer Alveys. This one was the Indiana state finance director a couple years back, and allegedly had back-door communications with the operators of a proposed gasification plant about a pending contract; not cool under state sunshine laws.

On the Internet, anyone can be a cute kid. Or Jennifer Alvey. Photo courtesy Stockvault.net.

Another Jennifer Alvey, a few years back, was convicted of shaking her adopted daughter and causing the baby’s death. Though the events took place just before I moved to Tennessee, in one of life’s odd coincidences, we moved to a town only a few miles from that other Jennifer Alvey, just before her trial.

While allegations of back room political dealings are certainly better than a dead child, still, I’m yet again setting the record straight: It’s not me!! I’m barely qualified to be my own personal finance director, let alone direct the finances of an entire state like that other Jennifer Alvey. And I’ve never lived in Indiana; the closest I got was one summer in Louisville. I did work for a magazine that covered the utility industry, many moons and jobs ago. Trust me, that was way too close to utility companies; my bored-to-tears sensors worked overtime.

Identity is a funny thing in this day and age, isn’t it? It used to be that if someone with your name did something questionable or notable, you clipped the article from the paper, posted it on your bulletin board, and had a good laugh with your colleagues about it. In fact, at my last BigLaw gig, I had a friend named Susan Smith. She was not the one who locked her kids in a car and pushed the car into a lake. My friend didn’t cut out those headlines, I don’t think. She just waited for the hubbub to simmer down.

Now, with search engines and so much info slopping around the interwebz, you have to set things like Google Alerts to tell you if your name is being trashed, because online is often the only way we hear about businesses these days. Particularly if you are a professional of any sort, you can’t be passive about identity. It’s so very different from what was normal when I first started practicing law, and email was only used within a company, not even between companies. (Yes, once again revealing how I am from the Jurassic.)

Here’s who this Jennifer Alvey is: a recovering lawyer who helps unhappy attorneys see themselves fully, and helps them find their best work and best life. This Jennifer Alvey has followed an, er, interesting life path from Kentucky to Duke Law to BigLaw in Washington, D.C., to escaping into publishing, to moving out of the big city to near Nashville, Tennessee, and then into life and career coaching.

And if you want to set up a sample coaching session with the Jennifer Alvey who is not a murderer or a political wheeler and dealer, you can email me at jalvey@jenniferalvey.com. Or heck, you can just email me to say hi. I dig those kinds of emails.