We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
I recently moved to Japan. My name, as it appears on my passport, is 26 characters long and consists of a-z letters and spaces. This means I run into three problems:<p>First, many computer systems here can't fit names that long, leading to truncation, or in some cases, denial of account creation (some places have rules that whatever's on the account must match exactly what's on the passport; one was nice enough to add a new column to their database for the rest of my name).<p>Second, many systems don't support a-z, so we throw the name in as katakana or double-byte romaji, depending on what works. Sometimes neither will work, and we just have to give up and go somewhere else.<p>Finally, many computer systems can only link accounts if the names match exactly, for example inter-bank transfers and bill payments. Since my name is truncated differently in different places, and is formatted differently in different systems, in many cases it's just impossible.<p>For example, right now I'm charged a fee for transferring money between two bank accounts, since the free transfers only apply if the names match exactly. I just withdraw cash from one and deposit it into the other as a workaround.<p>Another example is my cell phone bill. To pay it by CC my name must match exactly, but all my cards have slightly different spellings.<p>Don't even get me started on my wife, who is ethnically Japanese but came with me as a foreigner and hence has a name written using a-z letters. It literally has set of fraud detection systems.