Comment by DC-3
3 days 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!
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.
I’m a twin and my parents never told us who was ‘first’.
They probably don't know. If you're identical, babies are mixed-up for sure during the stressful first couple of days.
There's probably a medical document somewhere with the exact time of birth, but no way of knowing who's it really is.
You posted first, so you are 1 here
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Do you think it was an equality thing?
They not told it to you.
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.
I love seeing what the apostrophe in my last name breaks when I sign up for services.
Converting it to an HTML character entity is not really expected behaviour, but it was among the most amusing I’ve seen.
O'Brien was it? Bonus points if you edit the profile and those are expanded too. Hello Mr. O'Brien.
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I wonder if developers have a different naming convention for their children... Even on a subconscious level
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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.
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.
> 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
I knew a Steve Penington who broke a user id scheme.
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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".
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.
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!
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
If they were a year or two apart the DOB would have disambiguated it.