The government ate my name

>>notok+(OP)
Just taking this opportunity to vent.

When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from

  First: Jane

  Middle: Ann

  Last: Smith

  First: Jane

  Middle: Smith

  Last: Mylastname

All was well and good until very recently when I was at the DMV with her and we were renewing her drivers license. We found out then that the person entering her name change form at the Social Security department had misentered it as

  First: Jane

  Middle: [none]

  Last: Smith Mylastname (no hyphen, just a space)

For fun, her US passport shows it correctly, like:

  Given names: Jane Smith

  Last: Mylastname

So two federal agencies have her name in two different ways. Yay! The DMV lady was unhappy with this but we talked her into accepting the truth on her passport so we could renew her license, but obviously you can't count on the cheerful disposition of all future DMV clerks. The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally, which will cost about $400 all told. My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper, but that's just a plain templated text message that will read:

"Notice is given that Jane Smith Mylastname is changing her name to Jane Smith Mylastname"

for which privilege we get to pay $75.

Good grief.

>>kstrau+Nn
> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper

For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state.

I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done.

Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.

>>theweb+to
>Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name

I know this pain.

What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.

I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.

Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.

zlacker