The other day, Alan Kucheck pointed me to an interesting blog post about names and how programmers deal (or don't deal) with them.  This post resonated with me in many ways: as a software guy in general, as someone deeply interested in information and identity mapping, as someone who uses computers almost constantly, and as someone whose name rarely fits into existing web forms.

My full name on my birth certificate is "Frank Andrew Seidl II".  My Dad was also "Frank", so everyone called me "Andy" to avoid confusion—it stuck.  My signature reads "F. Andy Seidl" (if you can read it at all.) 

I can attest to how many systems make bad assumptions about names.  The most frequent, and obvious offender is the large class of forms that look like:

First:   [_______________]
Initial: [_]
Last:    [_______________]

Or simply those that have:

First: [________]
Last:  [________]

Often, I’ll try to put “F. Andy” in the “First” field, but frequently the system defines that as “illegal”.  Apparently, many systems feel a period, space, or other punctuation just does not belong in a first (or last) name.

Then there are the countless "personalized" messages I get like "Dear F.," or "Thank you, F.!"  (BTW, if you want to almost guarantee your message will fall unread off the bottom of my bloated inbox, address me as "F.")

As a matter of expediency, I sign off most e-mails with "—fas".  There's usually a full standard e-mail signature block below that, so even people that don't know me personally can see my full name.  But then I still get plenty of replies that begin "Hi fas, ..."

But its not only programmers that get all in a twist about names.  What about all those legal documents that have a signature line and require your legal signature to be your full legal name? What if your signature (like mine) isn't your full legal name?  I sold a business once where I had to sign 93 documents at the closing.  But I had to sign each twice—once to match my birth certificate, once to match the signature on my driver’s license.

(Oh, and BTW, few people ever spell my last name correctly.  But that's another matter.)

I've just gotten used to it. But at least the software systems I design can accommodate my name.

   —fas