Recalling this good post about names
Was thinking recently about this fantastic post about how badly most digital systems for tracking names fail to accept all forms of names, naming, etc.
I have lived in Japan for several years, programming in a professional capacity, and I have broken many systems by the simple expedient of being introduced into them. (Most people call me Patrick McKenzie, but I’ll acknowledge as correct any of six different “full” names, any many systems I deal with will accept precisely none of them.) Similarly, I’ve worked with Big Freaking Enterprises which, by dint of doing business globally, have theoretically designed their systems to allow all names to work in them. I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere.
Even if you live in an anglophone region and have a name that conforms to the standard expected anglophone "one given name, one middle name, one surname" format, you probably have people in your life whose slight divergence from this pattern have baffled a naming system. Anyone who has friends who changed their name, divorced friends, straight women friends who never took their husband's surname legally, friends who immigrated between regions with different writing systems, friends with two-word last names or last names with mid-word capitalization, hyphens, and so on - all these people probably have stories to tell you about how a system jacked up their name and caused them unnecessary stress.