Die, Lazy Programmers!

[akirlu]

I didn't realize the full scale of the annoyance I'd brought on my own head when I decided to change my last name upon marrying. It's a stealth thing, really. Because I figured, how hard could it be to spell "O'Brien"? Plenty hard, apparently. Hal periodically gets exercised about this.

For ordinary humans, the confusion lies in the final vowel -- often as not they misspell it as "O'Brian". For programmer humans the problem lies with the apostrophe. It seems that a great many programmer humans were not imaginative enough to recognize that apostrophes are needful and legitimate characters to include in database fields. Or too lazy to test the utility of their fields against outlier cases.

Programmer humans who work for credit card companies are evidently particularly unimaginative, and so only about half of the cards in my wallet actually contain a correct-down-to-the-apostrophe spelling of my last name. The rest don't have an apostrophe available. Compound that with the fact that credit cards spell out your name in all-caps on the card, and have different protocols for re-mixing the cases, and you find that one of my cards thinks my last name is "Obrien" while another thinks it is "OBrien". *sigh* But for the purposes of credit cards, I am grown reconciled to living with a state of error.

For the purposes of my real name, or rather my "Real Name", though, I would rather have my apostrophe. Regular Amazon.com users may be getting an inkling of where this is going.

See, I had decided I wanted to add a "Real Name" certification to my Amazon profile for purposes of reviewing. Which took a deal of fiddling to figure out how to do, because I am apparently not the demographic for which the Amazon user interface was designed. But once I sorted out how to get to the setting, I had a new joy in store for me. Amazon validates your "Real Name" by what is on the credit cards you have on file with them. And, for some reason, they only validate against a subset of the cards you have on file with them. And with unerring accuracy, the only two cards they offered me to validate against were cards that had no apostrophe. Naturally, since they're "certifying" the realness of my "Real Name", they won't let me edit my choices. So I have the option of affirming that my "Real Name" is either "OBrien" or "Obrien".

Fuck no. I realize I'm a bonehead. Nonetheless, I won't do it. Instead, I took the option of taking a "pen name" instead. My "pen name" is O'Brien.

Thus we see the real power of the pen.

Comments

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Care to guess how many legitimate spellings of "Allen" there are?

Of course, none of them have apostrophes (as far as I know, anyway). Or intermediate capitalization.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Never thought I would admire the silly Norwegians.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I can think of about seven variations of "Allen" but it wouldn't surprise me to find there are more. In our case, we have the additional joy of having to guess whether the data entry protocol substituted a space for the apostrophe, some other non-letter character, or no space. Eventually one can grow tired of guessing what one's own name might be.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Huh - I know 7 also (Allen,Allan,Alan,Alen,Allyn,Alun,Alon
not to mention Aileen, which looks like Allen if you squint,
or Alien, which looks like Allen if you dirty up the "i"
but I'm guessing you know one that I don't.

Oh, yea, I used to play that game in school when I was, uh, recreating :-)

(the other game was to guess what TECO did when you typed your name into it. You have to be especially geeky, and gray haired, to have even heard of TECO)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'm insufficiently geeky or insufficiently gray-haired to know TECO. Might be a bit of both, I suppose.

Looks like the two Allans I have that you don't are: Alain and Ailean -- French and Irish.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about Alain - I knew one of those, so I shouldn't have. but the Irish version is completely new to me. Cool.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm not *that* gray-haired! Mostly it's in the beard.

"dd-b" wasn't very interesting. The full name was too long. And I don't remember all that much any more. But I first started using Emacs using the original version written in ITS TECO, running under the "incompatibility package" on TOPS-20, and I've got Emacs windows from (only) two computers plus Xkeymacs running in front of me at this moment.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

They gray started with my beard, too. Now about the only place that isn't gray is a bit in my beard... Typing your login name doesn't count in the game - its your full name. I don't remember enough teco anymore to know what the hyphen would do. The "e" is the tricky one, as they called external/extended functions, as I recall.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Hey, look, the ITS TECO manual is online! http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/teco/itsteco/

It's dated 5-Aug-1981, which means this is quite likely the exact version I learned from; I started working at DEC Marlbolo in July 1981.

ER reads from file, so since there isn't a ^[ in my name, that and everything after it don't do anything.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are a lot, but I expect every single one of them is valid for most credit cards, for Amazon reviewing, and so forth.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I noticed early on in John's and my relationship that people had a lot of trouble spelling as well as pronouncing his last name, "Bartelt," whereas they always get mine, "Huntzinger," right. So even had I been interested in swapping my surname for John's I would have thought long and hard about how much I wanted to spend the rest of my life saying, "No, not Bartlett."

Of course, if he'd been named, I dunno, Plantagenet, I might have been willing to put up with the inconvenience. But I'm sure Amazon.com would have thought my Real Name was Plant Agent or something.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I am fascinated to learn that people always get Huntzinger right. That's not at all intuitive. Then again, it's not at all intuitive that they would screw up O'Brien quite so regularly.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, the "z" could be an "s" I suppose.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

They might also drop the 't'.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Oh! What planet are you an agent of?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Peculiar that it should be often rendered O'Brian, because I've always thought of O'Brien as the default spelling, and have to remember that the famous sea-stories author spells it differently.

There are of course plenty of other names that begin O', so apostrophe trouble is presumably not rare. Kudos to alphebetizing programs that know to ignore the apostrophe.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I've always assumed that the first name Brian is the reason for all the O'Brian errors. Because you're quite right that "O'Brien" is otherwise far and away the default.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

I have never actually changed my name upon marriage, and it astounds me what a hassle such a supposedly traditional procedure presents. (Rite of passage anyone?) So we always order out under the name of Adams, which happens to be my mom's second husband's name, and mine, kinda random! and is marginally easier for the Thai restaurant to spell than our official norske S-u-n-D-as-in-Dog-B-as-in-Boy-Y (otherwise rendered Sunday or Sundy).

Nonetheless my son has the same name as dozens of other people on Facebook. We gave him a Mc-middle family name so he can distinguish himself from the rest when he wants. No worries there, altho I suppose he could fuss about the space/ no space and the second capital letter, but it's so badly misspelled from the Scots as to be unrecognizable in ye olde countrie anyway. McKaskle = McCaskle and that ilk = McAsgill. Vikings! Arrr!

[ckd]

I remember hearing once that when Lois McMaster Bujold and Pat Wrede go to restaurants, they discovered that if they put the table in Lois's name it'll be correctly spelled but pronounced wrong and if they put it in Pat's, it'll be spelled wrong (probably "Reedy") but pronounced correctly.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The handy thing about "Ulrika" is that it's often the case that people can misspell it and mispronounce it at the same time.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Well, Marilee, too.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

"Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value."

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

My experience with my name has actually gotten rather *better* in the computer era. My expectations are higher, so it might not have changed my level of annoyance much. But these days I can quite routinely count on finding it filed under "D"; before, it was pretty much a tossup between "D" and "B".

And have you noticed how hard it is to find a way to actually complain to the web site managers about such things?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started on bad web design in terms of figuring out who to contact. I'll start chewing the wallpaper off the walls.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I should have mentioned -- my most insulting theory about this is it's a result of their using the COBOL "IF ALPHABETIC" test to validate the name field.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm sure that would be funny if I spoke COBOL. I used to speak a bit of PL1, but gave it up as a bad business.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

At least you can admit to it in public without being mocked.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

You haven't mentioned the potential problem some people have been discussing recently -- airline check-in and/or national entry may be delayed or refused if there is some descrepancy in the spelling between the name in which it was purchased, the name on the credit card used, and the photo-IDs presented. Good Luck to those who travel under such fiendishly-complicated names.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I haven't had a problem with that, so far, but then I haven't done very much air travel since we moved to Seattle. I'll let you know how our trip to LA goes...

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I never ran into that in 2.5 years of commuting to California (well, monthly). Most of my credit cards are missing the hyphen. But I suspect they're on to missing special characters in credit cards, and everything else matched, I bought the tickets in my proper name and my ID has it right.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I don't have apostrophes and all my cards and government stuff is right. What bothers me are the websites I buy from that don't offer a space for a middle initial. My name looks wounded without the J.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sure that it will bugger things up in other ways, but you could include the J. at the end of the first name field.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I've done that at a couple and so far no problem, so maybe I'll continue.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Oh, and jumping back to the original article title -- NO! Lazy programmers are what you *want*; what we're complaining about here is programmers who went to *extra effort* to exclude our names. That's not lazy, that's overly-energetic, and terribly ignorant.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I took to spelling my last name out before pronouncing it, "R-e-s-t, Rest."
One of the current jokes is, "I used to say it was the shortest name people could get wrong, until someone Chinese [with a three-letter surname] corrected me."

Family joke: My mother's maiden name was Rosenberg, and when my parents got married, she said now people could spell her name. On their honeymoon, a bundle of laundry came back with "Rest" carefully crossed out and "West? Best?" written in.