And like the author, 90% of the time I can just disable their front-end validation and go on my merry way.
One of them was to submit a photo of my drivers license. After I did that it OCRed out some details and prepopulated a form with my information. Hitting submit gave me an error saying to use my full middle name, not an initial. My full middle name is a single letter though.
The person on the phone with my bank had no idea what to do and just kept asking me try again.
I busted out my elite hacker skills though and added a space to the end of the middle name field and was able to steal my own identity.
I guess you could follow the Simpsons joke and spell the letter's name. I'm adding this one to my personal list of falsehoods programmers believe about names.
<quote>
2.1 Host Names and Numbers
The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.It's from 1989. ICANN was founded in 1998.