Toronto (February 17, 2007) -- When I was in Catholic School, I was just as feisty as I am today.  Egged on by Daddy, who believed that no error should go uncorrected or unvoiced, I occasionally found myself standing before Sister Mary Bernadette (miscreants did not sit in her presence) and hearing her reminder that "If you don't stop this behaviour, it will end up on your Permanent Record."  That meant, she explained, that when a girl applied to college, for a good job, or for an immigration visa, high school transcripts would be a part of that process and attached to those transcripts would be a list of her transgressions and the undeniable truth, in my case at least,  that she was someone who could not pick time, place and battles.

Later in life I had a boss who had deep psychological problems that on many occasions caused him to unload on staff and underlings in words he later denied (sincerely) he had ever said.  Unfortunately for him, technology was there to prove otherwise, and he was horrified to hear the voice mail tape replayed or see the words on the e-mail displayed -- to see the pdf of the handwritten obscenity, blasphemy and rage -- preserved for time and eternity and attached to him like Marley's chains.

Today it's the Internet that preserves our Permanent Record.  When a clean-cut young man goes into an executive office to apply for a position, he may well be horrified to see his MySpace page displayed on the interviewer's Big Screen, and his nekkid booty twitching to the beat of some hip hop blasphemy-riddled spew.  The young woman applying for a teaching position may be equally shocked to see photos of her response at that NA$CAR race to the "show us your t*tties!" cry that frequently arises as the crowd waits for the 25 car pile-up they came to see, arrayed on the desk before Sister Principal.   And the middle aged guy applying for a security clearance may be handed a sheaf of PDFs to leaf through, copies of his high school and university spew that has made its way around the world.

Not to mention, of course, the day some nitwit who has heard about your prowess with the written (blogged) word hires you without reading what you're writing, and is confronted on international television, radio and newsprint -- not to mention the blogosphere -- with the kind of obscenity, blasphemy and poo-poo talk that would get anybody's young daughter a mouthful of dish soap and 1,000 lines to write before she can have her computer, iPod and cell phone back.

It's all on your Permanent Record, boys and girls.  Every word you write, every photo taken of you, every webcast you produce and everything you do in the presence of a cell phone camera is going to end up fastened to your heels like your shadow.  Erase it, throw the hard drive in the river, shred the papers,destroy the disks and DVDs, and know that somewhere in the world somebody's got copies.  It's all on your permanent record and it's easy to find.  If your parents didn't train your conscience, know that Google will step in to fill that void.  If you don't believe it, pull up Google Advanced Search and type your full name into the middle bar and hit search.  Then realize that everything you read is available to your boss, the people you want to be your boss, the press, the church, your would-be wife, the government, the international security apparatus, and your future in-laws...and there's not a thing you can do about it.

Granny used to say "Never do or say anything you don't want on the front page of the newspaper."  Today's version of that would be "Never do or say anything that you don't want people you care about to Google."  The difference is, of course, that in the past, your nekkid butt probably wouldn't have make it onto the front page of the paper, and pulling up your shirt at a NA$CAR race might not have attracted the attention of your future in-laws unless they were at the race.  And the nasty limerick you recited to your admiring friends about the Virgin Mary might not have made it past the boys' bathroom in Junior High.  Today they will be there for the world to find and display.  If you don't want to see it on the Jumbotron at the Republican Convention, better think twice about doing it at all.  Just ask the two Blaspheming Bloggers who -- not by their ignorant, dithering boss, but the public who got to read the evidence -- found themselves unemployed and humiliated this week.

It's all right there on your Permanent Record.  Maybe you ought to go have a look and see what "it" really is.