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> I prefer to use my middle name and really dislike using my first name (shared with my dad, who I don't have a good relationship with). I'm endlessly having to explain every single stinking time I interact with pretty much anyone.

This sounds dramatically overstated. Going by your middle name is normal and doesn't require much in the way of explanations. For example, my father goes by his middle name. This has led to "problems" all of one time -- when he worked for the military, they insisted on the first name. So, during that period, he used the first name.

I know it's a minor annoyance, but it's something that jades me every single day and gets really old after a while. I feel companies and websites should do a better job of being respectful. A "what should we call you" field is simple and easy, would make the service much more friendly to some people.

So do you dutifully put your real first name into all forms? I know people who always go by shortened versions of their name (e.g. Rob instead of Robert). They just put in their preferred name as their first name for everything (uni, bills, etc.)

You can't blame companies for using the name they give you. Are you worried about being accused of fraud or something?

It really depends on where. Some places you'll have no trouble and others you will. Whether or not you'll have problems depends on what you want to do.

I've have the opposite problem in Japan. Virtually everywhere insists that I use the name on my (Canadian) passport as my official name. It's listed as "Lastname Middlename Firstname". Some government offices can handle 3 names (Yay). Some government offices understand the order for Canadian names and since they often can only handle 2 names, will record my name as "Lastname Firstname" (in Japan, family name comes first). Other offices don't understand the order and assume that my single given name has a space in it. Since they can't handle spaces in their software they list my name as "Lastname Middlename". No amount of explanation will detract them as they have to do it the way they've been told.

So now I've got 3 official versions of my name in Japanese official databases (4 if you count the version that is truncated because my name has too many characters). Luckily none of their systems talk to each other ;-) -- though I had one heck of a time getting my "My Number" (similar to social security number) registered because of the confusion. I feel sorry for any Portuguese people (who often have a lot of names) who live in Japan ;-)

The situation in the US is not nearly so bad, but I've definitely heard of problems before.

That was very informative. Thank you for sharing this ( and useful for my day work ).

I know that western naming convention is just that, a convention, but it does help to see how other cultures handled it.

Apart from all this, it is always interesting how a given system deals with exceptions.

Is there a reason your wife didn't adopt your last name?

Presumably, if she wanted to change her name to avoid these problems she'd have done that independently. Most people would not want to change their name because of badly programmed systems.

Also, many people (and many cultures) consider adopting your husband's surname to be weird.

It's not something Burmese women are used to doing, and if you think about it it's kind of a weird holdover from a much more patriarchal time. But, if she'd known how difficult it would be I think she would have anyway.

Tons of immigrants at Ellis Island did not have last names, and were assigned them on the spot, or made them up on the spot. Sometimes with humorous results.

I imagine it would be extremely difficult to operate in the US without a last name. She doesn't have to adopt yours obviously, but she could pick one.

For example Osama Bin Laden. Bin is not his middle name, and Laden is not his last name. It means Osama son of Laden. But his relatives in the US use "BinLaden" as if it were a last name.

In other words, "I dislike that name, as it doesn't fit the One True Way Of Naming. Here's a Real(tm) name for you." How very nice of you /s

Or, as the article says, "39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎."

That's like saying, I don't like having an @ symbol in my email address, fix it, make it work the way I like it.

Sometimes you just gotta make accommodations to where you live. Having a last name for legal purposes doesn't really change anything about you.

Quite the opposite, IMNSHO: "I don't like people using + in their emails, ban that! Everyone should have an address [a-z]{3,}@[a-z]{3,}\.[a-z]{2,4} - anything else is HERESY! You gotta make accommodations, else you'll break my overly restrictive assumptions."

You mean like when you move to a country and are oppressed into having to write addresses on envelopes in the way the local postal service expects it?

If email systems were a national thing, and I'd move somewhere where they didn't accept "+" in email addresses for, say, official government communications, then .. yeah, I'd have to get a new email address.

Personally I find it much more annoying if people mispronounce my name (which happens in a personal face-to-face setting) than if I had to write my name down in a certain way on a form, to make it work with the system. It's just an identifier for the system. I wouldn't get the same SSN or phone number either--which is just about as silly to expect.

It would be nice if they had standard ways of dealing with names that do not fit in such a system, so that at least the variant to make it work would be the same everywhere else. But to demand it to be taken verbatim and work correctly in the system, that's like moving to another country and demanding you keep the same land line number.

If there was a specific postal service for each building, each with their own set of requirements, you mean. And each, of course, insists that theirs is the One True Way. Yeah, that's a nice world to live in: change yourself ten ways from Sunday to fit into various, mutually incompatible and completely arbitrary rules; all so that the original developer making the rules up on the spot would have an easier job.

Just whatever you do don’t put ‘null’ into the fields lol

Or "DROP TABLES"!