Hirsute Sea Bass

Finally, a cause we can unite behind

I think it's time to start a campaign to convince the database and web programmers of the world that sometimes people have names that are structured in ways other than the most common method of a capitalized first letter followed by a series of lower-case letters. Sometimes people have two word first names, sometimes people have hyphens in their last names, and sometimes people even capitalize the first two letters of their last name and separate them with an apostrophe. Crazy, I know. All I'm saying is that it doesn't take that long to add these few exceptions to your input-checking code and throw in an escape character (which is 99% of the time just a backslash) before the apostrophes so that they won't be interpreted as extra single quotes and thus as syntax errors.

Either the coders of the world will have to start doing this or I will have to drop the apostrophe from my last name. I'm sick of having my records not stored in your databases even though I get a confirmation page and I'm sick of having to give multiple spellings everytime I need to be looked up somewhere. Be sensitive to my proud Irish heritage already.

posted by John @ 5:31 PM