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Comment by adanto6840 | Hacker News Reader

I too have an apostrophe in my name and experience the same thing. I've had people put it into their system as a comma, dash, space, and all sorts of weirdness despite my calling it out specifically.

My experience has actually improved substantially in the last 10 years or so, and most of the government systems I encounter these days actually handle it properly (as well as handling suffix properly too). That said, I've somewhat recently started having trouble checking in for flights again -- I flew last month and it took the ticketing agent >20 minutes to find my reservation on both the outbound and return flights, even despite my providing the 'confirmation code' / itinerary email (we were checking bags & flying with infants, else I'd have done online check-in).

It can be really frustrating -- though I'm hopeful it will continue improving and hopefully be a smoother experience by the time my kids are adults.

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> I've had people put it into their system as a comma, dash, space, and all sorts of weirdness despite my calling it out specifically.

Ugh, yes. And it's insane how many people seem to just NOT KNOW what an apostrophe is.

> checking in for flights

Yea, airlines seem to be one of the worst offenders. I have Precheck but Spirit in particular is never able to match the name on my ticket to the name in the gov't database so I never get it. Just one more reason to avoid flying them I guess.

Out of curiosity, why not just omit the apostrophe for airline reservations then? I understand wanting your full, real name in many circumstances, but who cares about what the boarding pass says as long as you get to fly? I doubt the people checking ID would care about the missing apostrophe.

But ID checking is also done electronically at some checkpoints. If your ticket doesn't match your passport, your Visa, your Visa waiver, etc. you are going to be in trouble.

That being said last time I went to the US the person booking the ticket swapped my first name and last name. Only the person at the baggage dropoff noticed it, and after much deliberation they suggested to leave it that way. I went through with no issues apart from not being able to register the mileage.

Practically speaking, that makes sense. Philosophically, it's abhorrent. Blaming the user is bad behavior in general. Expecting a person to alter their name to confirm to a poor software implementation is just wrong.

Well, people with names that are not written with Latin script are coerced into whatever Latin transliteration their government uses when issuing passports. Bonus points for altering the transliteration rules from time to time.

I often did do this when I used to fly more often domestically, but it tends to cause other issues -- the primary one being a "frequent-flyer/mileage account name mismatch" which means that I have to undertake some manual process to collect my miles. I've lost out on countless 'airline miles' as a result via forgetting to do the manual process within N days after the trip.

Similarly, automated check-in kiosks are then usually unable to find the reservation via credit-card or passport scan -- meaning you're back to looking up the reservation code, and even that often fails, as if the apostrophe just flat-out causes issues with the query/lookup or something.

It can be very frustrating, and I'm increasingly often impressed (and vocalize the same) when I spell my name and the agent enters it correctly AND the system flawlessly handles it, too! The DMV systems in my state are one such example where I used to have issues but, in recent years, the problem appears to have been wholly addressed/handled.

Update your name in the mileage program to take the apostrophe out. They might be able to do it

He shouldn't have to. He is a human being. Computers were made to serve us, not the other way around.

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