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

[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."