6 ms·

I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which

by DC-3 2y ago

I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and request a second account... there was always a bit of contention between us about who got the 'proper' username and who got the disambiguated one!

seafoamteal 2y ago
It's weird that none of the systems automatically fell back to disambiguating with a number or something similar if the 'proper' one already existed. I'm wondering if you were a year or two apart instead, would the system simply silently fail to create a new username for the younger sibling when they joined?
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  If they were a year or two apart the DOB would have disambiguated it.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
At my school you were provisioned as <two-digit-start><first-three-firstname><first-three-last-name>. e.g. Joe Bloggs starting in 2000 is 00joeblo Cue problems when two "Simon Smith" join in the same year. They were given 00simsmi and 00smisim I think. I am pretty sure they spent 7 years at school forwarding each other email as various teachers assumed the default would work.
ghaff 2y ago
A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses. They did have a fallback--usually with second letter of given name. But, of course, a lot of people just automatically emailed the convention with the result that certain email "twins" got misdirected mail. A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daughter. As I recall, he actually had the email in the usual convention so it's not like his daughter was receiving lots of highly confidential financial info but there was regularly misdirected mail.
- skissane 2y ago
  > A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses I once heard a story (possibly apocryphal) about a place which used a similar “first initial and truncated surname” convention for usernames, except theirs was first three letters of surname, followed by first initial, followed by some digits. And it all worked great until they hired a guy named Tom Cunningham
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    I knew a Steve Penington who broke a user id scheme.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Bob Matt Derrick once told me of a facility whose maintenance supervisor was named Stuart Pedaso and he nearly had an aneurism from laughter. Secretary there didn't get it.
      - skissane 2y ago
        You know, it took me ages to finally get this… first three letters of first name plus first three letters of surname. Does that mean I’m his login? (And the last three letters of his surname sound a bit like another word, but adding that to his login as well ruins my dad joke.)
        genewitch 2y ago
        haha i didn't even think of the "stuped" - his racuous laughter was at "stuped aso"
juujian 2y ago
Meanwhile, friend of mine's last name was Li, and IDs were first initial + last name + # Her number had three digits. I'm guessing it's the birthday that really messed the system up though?
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Very common last name for Chinese and places like universities usually don't ever re-issue a username. So the "first-initial + last name + number" approach can get into triple digits easily.
detourdog 2y ago
I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  I anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99. (1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith, etc. It's a bit infuriating how many parents do this. Amusingly I've had O'Brien and other apostrophe-contsining names with no ill effects (because I sanitize my inputs). In the last couple years, though, I was forced to start dropping apostrophes because we had third-party apps/services we were syncing to that couldn't handle them.
  - tommica 2y ago
    I wonder if developers have a different naming convention for their children... Even on a subconscious level
    - EvanAnderson 2y ago
      I joked with my wife about using numbers in our daughter's name (k-rad 31337 style, with the first "letter" being a 3). I thought it would probably shake-out crappy software. In the end I knew it would be a mean thing to saddle the child with. It sounded like fun, though.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      Named after WOW characters.
  - 2y ago
js2 2y ago
In Severance S2E1, Mark W says to Mark S: "Would you be open to using a different first name to avoid confusion?" Did anyone ever ask that of you or your twin?
- froindt 2y ago
  A coworker used to work in a meatpacking plant. There were two people who had the exact same name, first middle and last. They worked in the same department and in fact on the same machine. They were both named Jose. One went by, pronounced, Hose-A, and the other Hose-B. Apparently the Jose's, coworkers, and HR were all fine with this because it was simply too confusing otherwise.
- DC-3 2y ago
  No one ever asked us that which is good because I don't think either of us would have been much impressed by the suggested :p
wodenokoto 2y ago
My university was [initial][lastname][year][letter][letter]@school.com, allowing for 26^2 people to have the same initials and last name every year. Despite having a rare last name and no twins, I was "AC".
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Was it confirmed to be sequential (AA, AB, AC, …)? Because it could’ve been just a random sequence-looking pick from the available space. Sort of like getting #0003 on Discord when they still had random numbers in usernames.
sensanaty 2y ago
I never know whether to use the ć in my name when signing up for systems that require full legal names (banks et al.). Even my own country's gov't sites break when I input my real name, but refuses to accept the name without the ć. It was a real pain in the ass when I had to make an appointment and go in to some dingy office at 6am because their system doesn't support one of the most common letters in Serbian names. There's like a 90% chance the dude who made the system has a similar name with a ć or č in it even! Surprisingly this has never broken for me in either Indonesia or the Netherlands though, whenever I've put the ć in it just converted it to a regular C which is perfectly acceptable for me (for context, it's pretty easy to guess which C is actually a ć or č in Serbian, similarly for s/š or z/ž, so seeing text without the proper diacritics doesn't really matter in most cases). My Dutch ID even correctly has the ć!
- Huppie 2y ago
  My first name starts with the 'letter' (digraph, actually [0]) IJ. I have a standard email I send to companies not honoring the only correct Dutch spelling of my name and/or initials. The GDPR makes it mandatory for companies to correctly process your personal details so while it can take a while sometimes it's gotten a lot better over the years. In your case (assuming you live in the EU) there's plenty of precedent to send a standard email like that too. Even banks have been forced kicking and screaming to fix it [1]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) [1]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with...

by DC-3 2y ago

seafoamteal 2y ago

It's weird that none of the systems automatically fell back to disambiguating with a number or something similar if the 'proper' one already existed. I'm wondering if you were a year or two apart instead, would the system simply silently fail to create a new username for the younger sibling when they joined?

philipwhiuk 2y ago
If they were a year or two apart the DOB would have disambiguated it.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

At my school you were provisioned as <two-digit-start><first-three-firstname><first-three-last-name>. e.g. Joe Bloggs starting in 2000 is 00joeblo Cue problems when two "Simon Smith" join in the same year. They were given 00simsmi and 00smisim I think. I am pretty sure they spent 7 years at school forwarding each other email as various teachers assumed the default would work.

ghaff 2y ago

A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses. They did have a fallback--usually with second letter of given name. But, of course, a lot of people just automatically emailed the convention with the result that certain email "twins" got misdirected mail. A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daughter. As I recall, he actually had the email in the usual convention so it's not like his daughter was receiving lots of highly confidential financial info but there was regularly misdirected mail.

skissane 2y ago
> A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses I once heard a story (possibly apocryphal) about a place which used a similar “first initial and truncated surname” convention for usernames, except theirs was first three letters of surname, followed by first initial, followed by some digits. And it all worked great until they hired a guy named Tom Cunningham
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  I knew a Steve Penington who broke a user id scheme.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Bob Matt Derrick once told me of a facility whose maintenance supervisor was named Stuart Pedaso and he nearly had an aneurism from laughter. Secretary there didn't get it.
    - skissane 2y ago
      You know, it took me ages to finally get this… first three letters of first name plus first three letters of surname. Does that mean I’m his login? (And the last three letters of his surname sound a bit like another word, but adding that to his login as well ruins my dad joke.)
      - genewitch 2y ago
        haha i didn't even think of the "stuped" - his racuous laughter was at "stuped aso"

juujian 2y ago

Meanwhile, friend of mine's last name was Li, and IDs were first initial + last name + # Her number had three digits. I'm guessing it's the birthday that really messed the system up though?

SoftTalker 2y ago
Very common last name for Chinese and places like universities usually don't ever re-issue a username. So the "first-initial + last name + number" approach can get into triple digits easily.

detourdog 2y ago

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

EvanAnderson 2y ago
I anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99. (1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith, etc. It's a bit infuriating how many parents do this. Amusingly I've had O'Brien and other apostrophe-contsining names with no ill effects (because I sanitize my inputs). In the last couple years, though, I was forced to start dropping apostrophes because we had third-party apps/services we were syncing to that couldn't handle them.
- tommica 2y ago
  I wonder if developers have a different naming convention for their children... Even on a subconscious level
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    I joked with my wife about using numbers in our daughter's name (k-rad 31337 style, with the first "letter" being a 3). I thought it would probably shake-out crappy software. In the end I knew it would be a mean thing to saddle the child with. It sounded like fun, though.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Named after WOW characters.
- 2y ago

js2 2y ago

In Severance S2E1, Mark W says to Mark S: "Would you be open to using a different first name to avoid confusion?" Did anyone ever ask that of you or your twin?

froindt 2y ago
A coworker used to work in a meatpacking plant. There were two people who had the exact same name, first middle and last. They worked in the same department and in fact on the same machine. They were both named Jose. One went by, pronounced, Hose-A, and the other Hose-B. Apparently the Jose's, coworkers, and HR were all fine with this because it was simply too confusing otherwise.
DC-3 2y ago
No one ever asked us that which is good because I don't think either of us would have been much impressed by the suggested :p

wodenokoto 2y ago

My university was [initial][lastname][year][letter][letter]@school.com, allowing for 26^2 people to have the same initials and last name every year. Despite having a rare last name and no twins, I was "AC".

drdaeman 2y ago
Was it confirmed to be sequential (AA, AB, AC, …)? Because it could’ve been just a random sequence-looking pick from the available space. Sort of like getting #0003 on Discord when they still had random numbers in usernames.

sensanaty 2y ago

I never know whether to use the ć in my name when signing up for systems that require full legal names (banks et al.). Even my own country's gov't sites break when I input my real name, but refuses to accept the name without the ć. It was a real pain in the ass when I had to make an appointment and go in to some dingy office at 6am because their system doesn't support one of the most common letters in Serbian names. There's like a 90% chance the dude who made the system has a similar name with a ć or č in it even! Surprisingly this has never broken for me in either Indonesia or the Netherlands though, whenever I've put the ć in it just converted it to a regular C which is perfectly acceptable for me (for context, it's pretty easy to guess which C is actually a ć or č in Serbian, similarly for s/š or z/ž, so seeing text without the proper diacritics doesn't really matter in most cases). My Dutch ID even correctly has the ć!

Huppie 2y ago
My first name starts with the 'letter' (digraph, actually [0]) IJ. I have a standard email I send to companies not honoring the only correct Dutch spelling of my name and/or initials. The GDPR makes it mandatory for companies to correctly process your personal details so while it can take a while sometimes it's gotten a lot better over the years. In your case (assuming you live in the EU) there's plenty of precedent to send a standard email like that too. Even banks have been forced kicking and screaming to fix it [1]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) [1]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with...