The Other Brian Moore

it turns out there could be only one

A few years back, I happened to see this book:

Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

I found it interesting, and not just because of the quality of the book – but because I had a very similar occurrence in my own life. Even more similar in some ways, as the “other” Brian Moore also inconveniently shared my exact birthdate, but different in the way that my accomplishments and level-of-adversity-overcomingness are far less than Wes’, and my doppelganger ended up experiencing an even more ignoble fate. You could say we’re the low budget, knock-off “two people with the name Moore” pair. Our only advantage is that you get to read our story (vastly less well written) here for free, while you have pay Jeff Bezos a few bucks to read the two Wes Moores’ story.

As trite as it is, “It all started when…” is unfortunately objectively the best way to begin this story, because it really did all start when I was attempting to rent an apartment after I had graduated from college. In comparison to Wes Moore (the author), I was…. not a Rhodes Scholar? Yes, that is an undeniably true description of my college career, hopefully camouflaging the reality of my poor grades. At any rate, the apartment did a background check on me before allowing my then-girlfriend and I to rent. Since I had committed no (major, verifiable) crimes, I figured it was just a formality – so I was very surprised when, the day we were packing to move, I received a call that they would be unable to rent to me due to my criminal history.

Over the phone, my hands full of moving boxes, they informed me that my identity had matched to a currently incarcerated person. I responded that I felt that it was very strange that, in their imagined scenario, a convicted criminal and escaped prisoner would provide his exact name and birthdate in order to rent a hideout to lay low. They were unimpressed by my logic. Fortunately they were more impressed by my girlfriend’s logic of “well why don’t I just put the lease under my name?” She passed her background check, as she always beats me at everything, which is why I married her. We established a tacit agreement with the landlord that they would not ask if she was harboring a known escaped prisoner, and we would not tell them.

With this issue resolved, and now residing in my new safe house, I mean, fully legal apartment residence, I did some research to find out exactly who their background check had turned up. It was pretty easy, as Ohio maintained an online database where you could search for any currently incarcerated individuals, and I soon found him. A guy with my exact first and last name (thankfully different middle name) and the exact same birthdate and birth county. Conceivably, we might have been born at the same hospital, taking our first shared breaths of Ohio air a few hallways away from each other. Most annoying, however, was the crime for which he’d been imprisoned: “corruption of a minor.” I am not an expert in criminal law, but I was confident that whatever this meant, it was not what I wanted to pop up when people googled my name – and unfortunately, when I did google my name over the past two decades, he regularly showed up as a resident at various prisons around the state of Ohio for increasingly serious crimes.

Thankfully, I already had quite a bit of security via obfuscation, thanks to the intense lack of creativity my parents showed on that day in 1981. The first time I had been acquainted with the real life wikipedia disambiguation page for “Brian Moore” was in high school, when Brian Moore (novelist) died. My “friends” at school delightedly brought in newspaper clippings of his obituary, and were understandably disappointed to find that I was actually still alive. A little more online research turned up some other stellar exemplars of my name, such as Brian Moore (rugby player) who had an early Geocities-style website set up denouncing him as “the Anti-Christ” for apparently having a habit of injuring a number of other teams’ star players. There was also Brian Moore (political activist), the 2008 candidate for president from…. the Socialist party. He went on the Colbert Report. I was not amused. On the less humiliating front, my parents saw an ad for Brian Moore guitars and cut it out for me. This is really all their fault, I don’t know why they thought it was funny. A friend linked an event honoring the work of Brian Moore (scientist), thinking I had actually accomplished something important in my life. Less amusingly, Brian Moore (police officer) was unfortunately shot in 2015, working for the NYPD.

But none of these Brian Moores had the same impact on my life as the one who shared my birthdate. For a time, after that first incident with the apartment, he managed not to commit any more crimes, and so I didn’t think too much about him until I was returning to the US from a work trip. They had just installed those new automated passport readers – you know, the ones where you scan your passport and they make a happy beep and display a happy green checkmark, then you walk on through? Well, this time, this machine did not do that. It made a very angry series of beeps and displayed a very unhappy red X, and then some cranky CBP agents came out to talk to me.

I quickly found myself sitting in a large room with a few dozen other people who, very coincidentally I’m sure, happened to all be of Middle Eastern descent. I’m sure they were also having some kind of name mix up too! Who knew it was so common? I wanted to get to know them better, but then I realized that I had a connecting flight in a few minutes and so I mentioned that fact to the very enthusiastic CBP agent who sat at a desk at the front of the room, and wondered if perhaps I might be able to leave to go make that flight? Like the apartment background check person, they were very enthusiastically unimpressed with my logic. So I sat there for a few hours, missing the flight.

Finally, someone ushered me into an office to, I thought, explain the issue. Actually, to be more accurate, what happened was that I sat down and the CBP guy looked at me. Then he looked at his computer screen. Then he looked at my passport. Then he pressed a bunch of buttons on his keyboard, then stared at the screen for a bit longer. This little dance – with which, as a programmer, I’m quite familiar – went on for quite a bit until finally he slapped my passport shut, handed it back to me and said I could go. They never actually explained what had happened. I mean, I had my suspicions that “the Other Brian Moore” was the problem, and tried to mention that, but they weren’t interested in confirming that. At least, until a few years later, after going through this little process a few times at airports, I actually met that rarest of birds: the helpful, kind, communicative CBP agent.

He was still unable to explicitly confirm that the matching name and birthdate were the issue, but it was pretty obvious from the unstated implications of the questions he asked – but he at least confirmed that there was an error, and not to worry. Even more unbelievably, provided me with a solution: he gave me a nice Department of Homeland Security Redress form that I could fill out, mail in and they apparently would… maybe… fix… the problem. Then he let me go. So I went home and filled that form out. I was a little suspicious at the level of personal information it required, and wondered if this was just going to let them arrest two Brian Moores for the price of one. But like a good compliant citizen I mailed it in. For a long time nothing happened.

A few months later I got back what is now one of my most cherished possessions: an official document from a federal level agency that I was not in fact a criminal, or at least not the criminal they were looking for. In truth it says no such thing, it says that it is maybe possibly possible that they may have accidentally matched my name to a very comprehensively accurate list of Definite Terrorists, and then very defensively notes that “even about 2% of complainants (such as myself) actually DO have some connection to the Terrorist Watchlist” which was very… not reassuring, on multiple levels? But I didn’t care! I was finally free of my evil twin! On top of this, they gave me a redress number – a NUMBER – that I could use when making flight reservations, or when talking to friendly CBP agents, that would act as a get-out-of-possible-jail card. The letter goes to great bureaucratic lengths to explain that this NOT a get-out-jail free card, but I wouldn’t have gotten far in life if I believed everything DHS said to me.

So, riding high on this great bureaucratic victory, I went back to my daily life. But it turns out I had only gotten the feds off my back – other people were still mistaken about which Brian Moore I was. People such as the Chief Security Officer of my company, who called me one day. I would like to pretend that I am such an important person at my company that C-level people call me all the time, but this is most definitely not the case. I picked up the phone, he introduced himself and asked “so, can we talk about your criminal record?” He paused, no doubt to let the gravity of his question sink in. I still perfectly remember the extremely confused noise he made over the phone when I started laughing. When I stopped laughing, I said “I know exactly what this is about. Tell whichever background check company we use to re-run it using social security number and middle name too.” He sounded skeptical, but said “okay, I’ll give you a call back after we do.” He did not, but since they didn’t fire me, I assume the new, more specific search turned up no crimes.

The particular irony of this is my company [at the time] explicitly offers “individual recognition” solutions for other companies, which is a nice way of saying “we fix up your stupid, terrible, mostly-duplicate data and make sure you have one nice clean record for each of your customers.” One big stumbling block to this process is people with very similar names and addresses, such “John Doe Sr.” and “John Doe Jr.” If Social Security publishes a death record for the father, we don’t want to apply it to the son – so we have quite a bit of logic that tries to avoid that problem using increasingly obscure differentiating details to tease them apart. Even worse is the situation where people with the same name and the same birthdate. I wish our CSO would have used our own software.

Thankfully, nothing bad came of this – I was never fired or suffered any consequence; in fact quite the opposite. My CSO never did call back, but someone else did. Turns out I wasn’t the only person that this background check company had provided less-than-precise-incriminating information to their employers. It had happened to enough people that they filed a class action lawsuit on (apparently) our behalf. So far I’ve received two checks in compensation, which definitely improved my opinion of Forced Dopplgangerism.

All in all, it wasn’t that bad. Sure, I had some difficulties, but I got some money out of it – and it makes a good story that I like to tell, just as I’m doing now. Plus, starting a few years ago, I noticed I was no longer having those bureaucratic difficulties. I was able to do various things – like travel outside the country – without any friendly chats with CBP agents. At first I chalked it up to my DHS get-out-of-jail free card, or the fix with the background check company, but out of curiosity, I ended up googling the Other Brian Moore one more time. And found the real reason:

And that is the end of the story.