'I'm NOT the Wii Fit girl!' | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET
June 12, 2008 4:41 PM PDT
'I'm NOT the Wii Fit girl!'
Posted by Erica Ogg 8 commentsHave you seen this?
So have 2.56 million other people. And there's one who's really not happy about it.
The video, now a legitimate Internet phenomenon, features one Lauren Bernat, an advertising executive in Florida, exercising--or gyrating rather suggestively is more like it--while using Nintendo's Wii Fit.
Another Lauren Bernat, a master's degree candidate for library science at St. John's University, is not amused. Actually, "utterly freaked out" is probably the most accurate way to describe it.
Bernat, 22, works as a librarian at a library for teenagers in New York, and said she first became aware of the Wii Fit girl video on YouTube (real title: "Why every guy should buy his girlfriend a Wii Fit"), when several "random guys" began sending her Facebook friend requests Thursday. Bernat, who has the strictest privacy setting on her Facebook profile, says she responded to several and asked who they were and why they were adding her.
"One of them told me, 'Google yourself, you obviously haven't seen the video,'" Bernat said in an interview Thursday.
When she did a search for her name, she was shocked to see it connected with the video, which has been linked to many times over. She quickly began to fear for her reputation, and her career, since she's currently in the process of applying for jobs.
"If someone has my business card, and doesn't know what I look like, and they Google me, it looks like it's me, and that's my whole career down the tubes," she said.
Bernat contacted Google, which owns YouTube, and several news sites that reposted the video, including CNET, asking that her name be removed. But therein lies the problem. It's an accurate story because the video does contain a Lauren Bernat--it just so happens there are more than one of them.
There's probably not much she can do, which is why the librarian Bernat is at a loss for how to proceed.
"This is bizarre to me, because I am this normal (person), and to seek the spotlight like this is not me," she said.
Fingers crossed that any potential new employers realize the same thing.