The saddest part of the obsession with names in the US is that the systems in place are woefully inadequate when it comes to handling names that fall outside th

The saddest part of the obsession with names in the US is that the systems in place are woefully inadequate when it comes to handling names that fall outside the standard US pattern of Firstname Initial Lastname, all in ASCII. My name contains the character ö, so every time I'm asked to give out my true name here in the US, I have to remember to not do that, and instead state my name as it's transcribed to ASCII in my passport. One time I booked plane tickets and wrote my last name as SCHRODER on the ticket, instead of SCHROEDER as it says on the passport. This was a HUGE PROBLEM BECAUSE THE NAMES DON'T MATCH. Yes, but, look, they're both wrong, and they're close enough that surely you can see they're the same? My husband has three first names, the middle of which is his given name, and one last name. For some reason when he applied for his EAD, the last letter of his third first name fell off (I'm guessing character limit in some field in some system), so when we was getting his SSN, there was a huge problem, because again, THE NAMES DIDN'T MATCH!!! So it was just gonna take weeks longer to receive it, presumably because some other human has to look at it and ok it. There was also not enough space in the first name field, so he got some of his first names moved to the middle name field instead. I'm sure this will cause all sorts of fun and hijinks in the future if someone tries to match the name kind by kind, instead of just the full name.