PSA, don't assume everyone has a name of at least 2 characters; it isn't remotely true. Some people don't even have more than one name.
Never a problem, often a conversation. Sometimes I'd have to spend a little effort to be sure it said "Aaron" on my driver license. Other areas like credit cards and employment I've been more flexible, going by "A Aaron" or "Aaron Aaron," etc.
SS used to call me "Aaron." At some point they renamed me to "UNK Aaron."
All fine.
Coming on two years ago, as part of a "pivot," I got my CDL, Commercial Driver License.
Up to this point my DL said "Aaron." During training my learners permit said "Aaron."
When it came time to take the CDL road test, the CDL office, separate in some way from the DMV, would not schedule my test.
"Because there must be something in the first and last name fields on the driver license."
Without investigating, I'm quite sure that they populate some CDL office record from some DMV record, and their software was written assuming that there must be two names and assuming that the DMV records would all have at least two names. But not three or more, because the programmer or requirements writer had personal experience with people without a middle name.
So I had to go back to the DMV and get my driver license changed to something else.
It too a while, phone calls, "can't you just ..." etc.
The clerk finally agreed to list me as "Unknown Aaron." Which, note, is not my legal name, just what the DMV agreed to call me. So my legal name and "wallet" name are not the same.
Now the CDL office recognized me as "Unknown Aaron." Took my test, got my permanent CDL. Which says "Unknown Aaron."
Hired on with a company which knows me as "Unknown Aaron," because they have to use my CDL name because the feds know me that way now.
Which means my health and other insurance knows me that way.
Which means my doctors know me that way.
So thanks, anonymous programmer.
NMN = No Middle Name
NLN = No Last Name
I'm sorry, but if I found that name IRL I'd have a hard time not laughing. Have you seen the Substitute Teacher sketch by Key and Peele?
My birth certificate name is patterned like Andrew Bruce-Carlos Denis-Edward Fatherson. After my parents split, I had many variations. E.g. school knowing me as Andrew Charles Motherson, my bank as Andrew Bruce Motherson, etc.
Every official document was something different, so I had an official change to get the most common variants in a close-enough form that still fits on most forms, i.e. Andrew Bruce Carlos Motherson.
It still feels like a missed opportunity to go as simple as possible, and shed some family baggage.
I ran into a similar issue with many online retailers when I was living in the inner city of Mannheim, Germany because a lot of online systems make assumptions on how a valid address looks.
Addresses in Mannheim's inner city follow the format "Char Number, Number". "A1,1" is a valid address if you want to send a letter to the district court. A1 being the city block the court is located at and 1 being the house number within that block.
I didn't get to do a lot of online shopping for years when I lived there.
Upd: reaction to this suggestion shows that some people don't understand how post office operates. They go to great lengths to understand where to deliver the mail/parcel. In most cases, addresses like "big yellow house with a red door overlooking the cliff near the lighthouse" would work. So the only challenge here is to get past the whatever dumb rule the service developer imposed on the address format. Likely it is just filter by string length.
In your case, automation actually didn't fail, it just didn't recognize your additional instruction. Probably, you could have just patched the address with an easily removable piece of tape and that would definitely trigger a human attention, and delivery would go where it should
Fair point. And that was the advice given to me by the postal service.
Having a database in which every citizen's domicile is registered does have its occasional advantages.
The sign is a flowchart, it says first, is this mail for a different address? If so, either redeliver it (duh) or write "Misdelivered" in bold leters and put it into any postbox.
If not, but you don't recognise the recipient, strike through the whole address in black pen and write clearly "Not at this address" then put it into the postbox.
This won't stop you getting more mail by the way, I still get letters labelled "Urgent" with the name of the previous owner years after I bought this place. But it does stop literally the same mail coming back since the OCR will reject the crossed out address -- it's just that the sender may not have any effective process for what to do when they get the mail back undeliverable.
Only for private unregistered mail. Registered mail is required to specify the address accurately.
But the naming in Mannheim causes a lot of issues, I remember early navigation systems having a hard time with the format. A IIRC TomTom even crashed when trying to announce the street.
Add in "user X's name changes to Y on date Z" (hard to put in a list of edge case names) and you've covered 98% of these issues.
That link of yours is very good.
https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
He has had problems registering his bike in India, with his name.
And then the system launches and the complaints start to roll in to support.