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The Big Lebowski and the Online People Search: More Connected Than you May Think

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Last week, I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend of mine. While enjoying the fine hospitality of his living room couch, I decided to pop the film The Big Lebowski into his VCR. Most of my friends had been raving about this cult flick for years, so I figured now was as good a time as ever to see it. After spending about two hours laughing hysterically, I was left with one surprising, yet probing, question, “Why didn’t anyone in this film use an online people search?

The plot of The Big Lebowski centers around a case of mistaken identity involving two individuals named Jeffrey Lebowski. The first Lebowski is elderly, extremely rich, and has a wife who is in major debt from time she spent in the adult film industry. Therefore, her former boss has dispatched several goons in California to collect the money from her or her husband by any means necessary. This individual is known in the film as “The Big Lebowski.”

The second Jeffrey Lebowski is single, loves to bowl, and is known simply as “The Dude.” Acting on poor information, the debt collectors searching for “The Big Lebowski” end up violently trying to collect money from “The Dude” instead. Humorous as this mistake turned out to be in the film, a simple online people search probably could have prevented the debt collectors’ error.

Online people searches can often eliminate cases of mistaken identity due to the variety of information they provide. In the case of the film The Big Lebowski, a simple people search conducted by the debt collectors would have easily differentiated between the two Lebowskis. Based on the information that the film provided, the results of an online people search on the two Lebowskis would probably yield information like this:

Marital Status
Big Lebowski (Married)
The Dude (Single)

Possible Relatives:
Big Lebowski (Bunny Lebowski-Wife)
The Dude (None)

Age
Big Lebowski 62)
The Dude (35)

Address
Big Lebowski (House Address Listed, CA)
The Dude (Apartment Address Listed, CA)

Had the debt collectors conducted an online search before they went to collect the owed money, they would have noticed that there was not only two individuals named Jeffrey Lebowski living in the same vicinity, but that these two individuals had completely different backgrounds. From there, the debt collectors could have simply chosen the correct Lebowski given the description they received from their boss.

So what have we learned today?