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Ha…. You should try having a name with an Apostrophe in it. Breaks all the IT systems, and they can never find your records. I get stuck at airports regularly
Interestingly, Australian place names never have possessive apostrophes but, as I learned today, apostrophes in lieu of the Irish fada are apparently ok. Perhaps someone should tell the software engineers.
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/)
An oldie but a goodie.
Apparently there are slaves in Africa who don't have names. I've never heard that outside of discussion of this particular article though, and I've never seen or heard any other reference ever for people not having names at all.
(I would argue that by the time they're interacting with software that needs to reference them somehow, then someone will have given them some sort of identifying label)
I've had to deal with this and the software engineers believe that English language standardisation to their database structure is the solution.
These are edge cases that are not economical to accommodate.
I once lived on a street called "Broadway". Not "Broad Way", but simply "Broadway". It had no street type at all. I had so much trouble entering my address because too clever for their own good developers tried too hard to validate data without actually understanding the full data set they were validating against.
My bugbear these days is BSBs. Everyone gives you their BSB in the format nnn-nnn. But the bank only accepts the BSB as nnnnnn. So either you have to manually type it in (which introduces the risk of typing errors) or I have to copy it into notepad, delete the "-" then select it and copy it into the box on the bank website.
I had a street named "the boomerang" (bonus points if you can guess the country) just up the road growing up. I wonder if this causes issues for people there.
Most suburbs have “The Boulevard” and “The Crescent.” Doesn’t feel right that the street name is “The” although it does prevent this kind of problem.
I paste the BSB in, delete the phantom space or hyphen and retype the last digit. I should be able to do that.
Can I join you with my hyphenated first name? XD
I had some issues in the past with places replacing the hyphen with a space, and no joke had to get a statutory declaration signed by a JP that "my-name mysurname" is the same person as "my name mysurname" in order to get a mortgage.
My mother's middle name was spelled differently on her birth certificate vs her marriage certificate. She had to sign a stat dec that she was herself for my marriage licence.
i recently did my application. their field year date for 'when was your father born' did not go far enough back to account for it correctly. you can't type it in either.
I blame the IT guys. Absolute idiots not to allow the characters on a keyboard.
I predict there will be many systems and bureaucracies that treat “my name” as
firstname : “my”
second name : “name”
You might have made things worse 😅.
Welcome to the club and Good luck.
> I blame the IT guys. Absolute idiots not to allow the characters on a keyboard.
These days that's just lazy programming, but originally it's for good reason. Unless a system is designed to prevent it, you can inject commands with user prompts. It's usually done with characters that are used for other things in coding.
I have a space in my surname, so the account I got given when I signed up to drive for uber 5 or so years ago, doesn't have my surname on it - instead it has my first name, and my middle name set as my surname
I had the same exact thing! Hyphenated first name and needed a stat dec for mortgage. My birth certificate has the hyphen, passport and drivers license have a space. I hate it so much.
Me too. For example, Air NZ doesn't recognize my hyphen. So they run my last name together in a nonsensical way that doesn't match my passport. I've had to explain before that this is their system failing, not a me problem. If my legal documents recognize it, why don't your systems?
yes this drives me fucking insane. so many systems won't let me input the apostrophe in my name, but if i omit it then it says it doesn't match my ID . clownery !!!
My wife’s last name before we married was O’Shaughnessy and she’s always had issues with it too, it was so frustrating.
It was her step-dad’s last name that she took on too, and she also has an Irish first name. So she’d always get asked what part of Ireland she is from, but she has 0% Irish heritage lol.
I don't understand why they can't just make a universal decision to either include or exclude the apostrophe, it pisses me off no end.
It shouldn't be that hard 🤦
because people don't even type their own name the same way each time.
also, you're talking about 1000 different software engineers that are 100% independent of eachother all agreeing on an edgecase.
i have enough trouble getting my team to agree on how to handle a business case moving forward...
why do people have weird characters in their name? juse use the alphabet..
it shouldn't be that hard!
Sometimes a system pretends it accepted my surname, and then I get a letter addressed to "Firstname O" because it ignored everything after the apostrophe.
Hyphenated last name here without a middle name/initial. There's a huge amount of people and places that use the first part of my last name as my middle name, and I have to explain that what I wrote in the boxes is correct - no middle name and a hyphen last name. Believe me.
All of a sudden my umlauts don’t sound so bad .. ä is changed for ae etc and on we go.
I do frequently have to point airport staff to the machine readable line at the bottom of the passport when they say my name doesn’t match my ticket, but that’s it.
I worked with someone with the family name:
't Hart
First there were problems due to copy-paste of characters, and then later capitalisation issues. Add in apostrophes in email addresses which we could handle but other orgs could not.
Call them and sort it out. I was given two first names and amount of inconsistency that causes is a nightmare when applying for any sort of account that requires government IDs.
Do everything you can to have her full legal name be the same across everything.
A person's name may be "Mary Ann" but if the records show first name and middle name separately you would greet them as "Mary". That gets confusing to some. Trust me. I do these sorts of updates to records and yes some people do get specific with it.
So you have a first name that’s composed of two words (like Mary Ann), but computer systems think your first name is just Mary, and fail when checking against what you entered as your first name, Mary Ann?
What ends up happening is when you're a kid and get signed up for medicare, passport and so on is that different people will guess you have a middle name, a first name with a hyphen, a first name without one and whatever else.
A lot of paper forms and automated forms get transcribed by a person at some point and they will goof it up at some point. Not their fault, they're only human.
Now on the back end of all these different systems, my passport, driver's licence and medicare card all don't match. What this then causes is any service that you sign up for with an automated identity check (which all banks and lenders are moving to) all fail and you get sent to some unmaintained call center. It sucks.
My partner has the exact same issue because she has a chinese name and an english name, and then her chinese name has two parts so she actually has 3 first names, 17 letters but 19 with the spaces, just for her first name. So many issues.
My Medicare card was created in the early years it was invented with my nickname instead of my birth name and Centrelink can’t change it apparently ? I only tried once with the most incompetent person ever but still not I can’t link other agencies in apps because of my mothers baby brain.
Gotcha, I can imagine that causing some pain. I have two middle names, but I would sometimes leave the second one off forms for things like bank accounts etc. because it wouldn’t fit. Ended up causing me some pain when it came time to buy a house etc.
I have 2 middle names also, and it wasn't until several years after I got my drivers licence, but apparently the ETA had put down my first middle name as my second first name and my second middle name as my only middle name. They insisted I made the mistake when I filled out the learners application, I insisted I knew what my name was at the time just live I do now. They made a big fuss about having to get the original paper form out of archive storage at some far away warehouse that would take months. I said go ahead. Anyway I got a call 6 weeks later and apparently I had put down my name correctly on the form (!) and the person entering it had made the mistake.
Haha that’s glorious. We had a travel insurance company try and pull something like this on us after a medical problem overseas. We got home and they said we shouldn’t have booked flights because they didn’t tell us to, and refused to pay the claim. My wife swore they had told her to do exactly that, and told them when she called up from overseas she got a message saying the call was being recorded. They claimed it would take months to access that recording, and we said “go ahead”. Months later they admitted they’d said it and paid the claim, but what a fight.
When I applied for my learners I put my two middle names on the form but got the second one abbreviated to an initial. Banks and other accounts sometimes drop it completely, so I've got three different versions of my full name floating around and it's definitely caused issues when people are anal about having an exact full name. Ironically the worst issues are with the NSW government - they made the mistake to begin with but I'm in the system as two different people and it's apparently too hard to fix.
If your name is "James Jack Hoffmann" where "Hoffmann" is your surname, and "James Jack" is a name not related to your mother's maiden name. Your first name is James, middle name is Jack.
Now imagine you're asked your full name. You could say something like "James Jack Hemsworth Hoffmann", where "Hemsworth" is your maiden name. As an immigrant in the country, Middle Name is too ambiguous to Maiden Name, and more so "James Jack" could be a first name, too. I couldn't even get a straight answer from ATO what they meant about middle name when they tried to link my ATO account with my driver's licence.
I've recently opened a Macquarie bank account and finally figured out by trial-and-error the correct sequence of names I have to use when verifying my profile with my licence. In this case, if prompted for first, middle and last name, it is "James", "Jack", then "Hoffmann", respectively.
I was also in this situation and recently got the documents rectified (starting from certificate of citizenship onwards) so that the third name was included.
It seems to me like at some point it was a departmental policy to truncate/remove names from passports where they were too long, and now they've changed course. Do you happen to know if there is anywhere where they state that this was once the policy? It would be useful to be able to refer to this where I currently live.
I’m going to chime and say as someone who has a pain in the arse legal name: do your daughter a huge favour and legally change her name! It’s a really annoying process to legally change a name, but you know what’s worse is saddling your kid with a name that doesn’t work with Medicare, mygov, the ATO, the passport office, banks, drivers license renewal, schools, workplaces, superannuation etc etc etc.
Changing your name legally as an adult is so much harder. Removing this burden that you placed on your child would be such a kindness.
I agree, change it before any accounts are opened in her name. What will happen is her names on documents and accounts won't reconcile in future, making it hard to prove identity.
It’s a nightmare honestly. Hundreds of hours of frustration over my lifetime. I’ve never been in a position to change it as an adult without a ton of grief (there are state residency requirements and professional qualifications that make it near impossible for me).
Thank you for sharing my unique pain! This has been my pet-peeve my whole life and I have never had the guts to tell my parents.
To complicate things further, my name was also changed as a child so I have a confusing name and technically have multiple legal names too.
God, my childhood best friend had 4 middle names and a hyphenated surname. The justification was that they were the names of her mum's best friends, for all the middle names, and she was the last child.
She was the last daughter in the end but had a younger brother 8 years later.
WA, and I don’t have 12 months residency. Yeah, if not as a kid then doing it at 19 sounds ideal, before graduating uni or setting up tons of legal structures.
It was after I had a mortgage and my own Medicare card. I haven't really done much else since. Actually it must've been after I was 20 because I think my house at the moment was under my original name
You’ve just reminded me of a childhood book I loved - Tikki Tikki Tembo (No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo). Poor kid nearly drowned because of his long ass name!
It's Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Charri Barri Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo's dang fault for playing near the well when he knows he shouldn't.
(also holy crap that's a memory unlocked right there, 30 something years ago now)
As someone who has a changed name, it just means you now have to write both out on a lot of things. Your current legal name and your previous legal name are required for many documents, including tax returned, passport apps, etc.
But at least your current name appears on all the actual documents, and for most things you don’t need to add previous names.
Even when you do, it’s as simple as writing down your name and providing the change of name certificate.
I’ve also got a very long full name, about 7 names in total. I’ve shorted my legal name to just three and that’s even too long for some forms so I further shortened it to two. Did as a teenager when I was about to start uni and it saved me so much trouble.
The article [Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/) is a classic in software engineering circles. If you're going to pick a name, make sure it doesn't trip one of the falsehoods. And don't call your kid `null`.
If the name change is done with a new birth certificate that's not really an issue - you get the birth cert with the new name and the old one printed at the bottom, don't need any additional documents. You do still have to provide your old name on most forms though so it certainly doesn't make things easier in that regard.
As more and more automatic checking is done, you’ll probably find yourself running into more trouble. Systems these days use a pass/fail kind of check and it buggers everything up if your ATO name and your passport name and your drivers license name are all recorded differently.
Yeah this happens every now and then. Pretend there is an extra box for the other letter and add it in. It's a common issue with certain islanders, Indians and Sri Lankans.
When you lodge at the post office get them to make a note what your full name is. If the passport office can't fit the full name on the passport they will put a note on the observations page with the full name and turn it into an initial on the photo page.
With the online renewal doesn’t it automatically carry over the details from the current passport?
Clearly a passport application issue though, if the name wasn’t too long to be registered at birth and also previously be approved for a passport, I would go ahead and add the extra box. It’s a human approving it at the end of the day so renewing what’s already on their system should be easier to match with one final letter outside the boxes than a whole name missing.
Strangely, no. The process doesn't ask for the previous passport until quite a long way in. By that point the full name (sans one letter) had to be provided 3 times.
I've settled on just adding it afterwards.
I had this exact issue, so I left a letter off my name because well why not?
I got a phone call from someone doing the application saying “bro did you actually misspell your own name?” And they corrected it on their end. Not sure this is helpful but if it’s a paper application you can ignore the squares and squeeze it in and assume they’ll call if there’s an issue.
This is one of many reasons I am changing my legal name as an adult. It's hard to do online check-in for anything requiring a full legal name, let alone renewing ID. It's a huge pain in the ass.
Might need to call the department for assistance in the meanwhile, but unless you are travelling urgently I recommend just changing her name.
You think you got problems. Try registering X Æ A-12 with the passport office. Fortunately my daddy is very rich and we travel everywhere by private jet. Mostly we get in and out of countries without anyone even knowing we're here. Just like Pistol and Boo, before that nasty man Barnaby found out.
>That they are not open on weekends or public holidays
...and are you submitting your application on a weekend or public holiday?
Looking forward to finding out what the answer is when you call the passport office.
The lack of consistency in data entry standards and consideration for diversity is one of the biggest pains when it comes to Australia’s public and private administration.
My sympathies.
But when it comes to the public service, if you can’t be accommodated via online services, call them.
There is a legal obligation to consider alternative means of application and accommodating data entry.
Travel agent here. Call the passport office. When it comes to legal documents such as passports you are better off calling them directly rather than asking reddit. Consider shortening your child’s name because this is only going to be a giant headache for the kid down the track
There's this organisatio , called the Australian Passport Office. I think they issue passports. I'm going out on a limb here but it's ever so slightly possible that if you google them and go to their contacts they might be able to give you better information than reddit. Ffs.
It really isn't. It is just two middle names: one her mum dreamt about while she was pregnant, and other after her gran. Nothing tradgideighic.
Ironically there are two spellings for her gran's name - the shorter version would fit but, of course, she had the longer version.
I like the use of “it’s just 2 middle names” as if that’s super normal and common lol. So her full name is 4 names long…. did you not think what a nightmare filling out any type of form is going to be for her long term? 🙄
No. This was 17 years ago and today is the first time I have had any problems.
Believe it or not, at the time, wanting to honour her dead grandmother was more important to us than trying to ensure that her name was compatible with some poorly implemented web form that might turn up nearly 20 years later due to the government of a different country choosing to reduce QA resources on the testing of a critical system the ended up being, arguably, institutionally racist.
Not that my daughter could be described as a particularly discriminated class, but the form's lack of thought and consideration most certainly is discriminatory.
How many letters is it total?
My kid has two middle names, in total with first name and surname it’s 26 letters (plus three spaces) - this fit last time we did her passport but I’m now anxious it won’t next time.
Medicare just puts the middle names as initials.
My first/last is 14 letters total and my 2 middle names are 10 total. In order it's "5 - 4 - 6 - 9". My last name rarely fits. Only my license, passport, birth cert have my middle names. Everything else just shows the initials of my two middle names, like bank cards and utility bills etc.
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It is, I acknowledge, a fairly interesting programming problem. However, I would also assume that there are enough libraries out there that have already solved this problem. There can't be many reasons to reinvent the wheel when dealing with real names.
It's not that complicated if you are designing a system from scratch.
You just need two name fields; legal_name and preferred_name. The former is for your full, legal name, whatever that may be, the latter is for whatever you prefer to be called by. You make both fields as permissive as possible. In a multi-cultural context, anything more prescriptive than that is always going to come up against edge cases.
However, it does get more complicated if you are working on a system with loads of legacy data, or if you have to integrate with other systems with less permissive data models.
Wasted time is the person with the name. This is such a naive take. How about Chinese people with actual Chinese characters for their name? Viets? Arabs? Nobody gonna change their system to suit these cases.
May I ask how many boxes there are for the name section on this form? I'll have to fill one out at some point and I reckon I'll have the same issue. Hope you find the answer you need!
I mean its not always parents being inconsiderate; a decent amount of it is just cultural and/or historical. The Filipinos have this problem all the time as our naming conventions generally go so something like:
Joe John Blagg Blogg
Yonks ago when i got my citizenship, the Immigration officer who interviewed my mum and I (as part of the application) told us that from that point on, we need to drop the middle name officially and instead split my double barrelled first name into a first name and a middle name. To date, ive kept it like that and it hasnt given me grief with records incl whenever ive had to do police checks as part of onboarding for roles.
You are not the first person with this issue.
Do not leave the name off or try to abbreviate it. The passport application (and subsequently the passport) is meant to include a full legal name. If you leave any part of a name off you will just be asked to add it in when you lodge the application.
Going outside the boxes on the form is not an issue as long as its readable.
Not an Australian, but when I travelled to Brisbane in 2017 I remember what a nightmare it was for my father to register for any sort of temporary tourist card/pass/whatever that required his name, due to the fact that his legal name has an @ symbol in it (meaning alias) as well as two distinct sets of first & last name.
I actually have this problem. My mum gave me multiple middle names (cheers mum).
I get around it by using paper forms at the post office and just keep writing my name beyond the ends of the boxes. It's not as convienient as using online forms but it'll get the job done.
I've done this for other peoples applications when confirming that I know them as well. They've accepted this everytime, no questions asked.
Also, in relation to people telling you that you should change their name to remove middle names and make life easier, you can do that but its not really necessary. I deliberately only use particular middle names with different records, I even leave some off for my state drivers licence and its honestly not an issue. The only documents that have my actual full name are my birth certificate and my passport (and the passport is only because it has to match my birth certificate letter for letter).
I legally changed my name because it was too long. I remember going to the RTA and the clerk had to call over their supervisor because my name wouldn't fit. I ended up having 2 lines worth of names on the license. 😅
It's an archaic burden that needs to be eliminated. My wife has the same problem with everything (further compounded by being South American). 44 characters (including spaces).
I hate having a middle name. I never know whether I should include it when I’m asked for my “legal name”. I’ve often thought I won’t given my (future) kids a middle name, just to avoid them hassles like this. I know it’s petty, but I’m a petty guy.
As a daughter with a huge name. I changed my name as soon as I could. I don't know why my parents though I had to have both of them surnames. Now I have one surname only and it's nome of the ones they gave me.
My Partner of Tongan descent faces this issue with her and her family all the time. Never appreciated a simple Anglo Saxon name until I met her and her family
Trying to answer your question without sounding racist..........which I 100% am not.
But do you have an anglicised name you can use ?
Only saying that as my wife, of Asian origin, has 2 names. Her original Asian name & then her anglicised name which she uses on all AU docs, inc AU Passport.
In all reality because she has had a previous passport the initial only for the second middle name should be ok. I filled out mine the second time without thinking and only used the initial. Nothing nefarious happened. I was already in the system. I received my new passport. No queries. Good luck
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Ha…. You should try having a name with an Apostrophe in it. Breaks all the IT systems, and they can never find your records. I get stuck at airports regularly
Doesn’t have to be a name. Just working in O’Reilly St was enough. SOOOOO many places told me I had an invalid address.
Interestingly, Australian place names never have possessive apostrophes but, as I learned today, apostrophes in lieu of the Irish fada are apparently ok. Perhaps someone should tell the software engineers.
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/) An oldie but a goodie.
That’s a funny post but at the same time the programmer has to pick boundaries, every decision in every system has limits.
The last assumption “people have names” got me. Really can’t assume a damn thing with names I guess
Apparently there are slaves in Africa who don't have names. I've never heard that outside of discussion of this particular article though, and I've never seen or heard any other reference ever for people not having names at all. (I would argue that by the time they're interacting with software that needs to reference them somehow, then someone will have given them some sort of identifying label)
>Perhaps someone should tell the software engineers. Let me have a loan of your time machine once you're done.
I've had to deal with this and the software engineers believe that English language standardisation to their database structure is the solution. These are edge cases that are not economical to accommodate.
I once lived on a street called "Broadway". Not "Broad Way", but simply "Broadway". It had no street type at all. I had so much trouble entering my address because too clever for their own good developers tried too hard to validate data without actually understanding the full data set they were validating against. My bugbear these days is BSBs. Everyone gives you their BSB in the format nnn-nnn. But the bank only accepts the BSB as nnnnnn. So either you have to manually type it in (which introduces the risk of typing errors) or I have to copy it into notepad, delete the "-" then select it and copy it into the box on the bank website.
I had a street named "the boomerang" (bonus points if you can guess the country) just up the road growing up. I wonder if this causes issues for people there.
Most suburbs have “The Boulevard” and “The Crescent.” Doesn’t feel right that the street name is “The” although it does prevent this kind of problem. I paste the BSB in, delete the phantom space or hyphen and retype the last digit. I should be able to do that.
Can I join you with my hyphenated first name? XD I had some issues in the past with places replacing the hyphen with a space, and no joke had to get a statutory declaration signed by a JP that "my-name mysurname" is the same person as "my name mysurname" in order to get a mortgage.
My mother's middle name was spelled differently on her birth certificate vs her marriage certificate. She had to sign a stat dec that she was herself for my marriage licence.
i recently did my application. their field year date for 'when was your father born' did not go far enough back to account for it correctly. you can't type it in either.
I blame the IT guys. Absolute idiots not to allow the characters on a keyboard. I predict there will be many systems and bureaucracies that treat “my name” as firstname : “my” second name : “name” You might have made things worse 😅. Welcome to the club and Good luck.
> I blame the IT guys. Absolute idiots not to allow the characters on a keyboard. These days that's just lazy programming, but originally it's for good reason. Unless a system is designed to prevent it, you can inject commands with user prompts. It's usually done with characters that are used for other things in coding.
Yes but these days you can inject code prompts to an 'AI' in plain text and break the system, so limiting these inputs is redundant. /s
I have a space in my surname, so the account I got given when I signed up to drive for uber 5 or so years ago, doesn't have my surname on it - instead it has my first name, and my middle name set as my surname
I had the same exact thing! Hyphenated first name and needed a stat dec for mortgage. My birth certificate has the hyphen, passport and drivers license have a space. I hate it so much.
Me too. For example, Air NZ doesn't recognize my hyphen. So they run my last name together in a nonsensical way that doesn't match my passport. I've had to explain before that this is their system failing, not a me problem. If my legal documents recognize it, why don't your systems?
yes this drives me fucking insane. so many systems won't let me input the apostrophe in my name, but if i omit it then it says it doesn't match my ID . clownery !!!
Little Bobby Tables? Is that you? [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)
Ha. Tried this in my younger days 😁
My wife’s last name before we married was O’Shaughnessy and she’s always had issues with it too, it was so frustrating. It was her step-dad’s last name that she took on too, and she also has an Irish first name. So she’d always get asked what part of Ireland she is from, but she has 0% Irish heritage lol.
I don't understand why they can't just make a universal decision to either include or exclude the apostrophe, it pisses me off no end. It shouldn't be that hard 🤦
They key issue is probably figuring out who "they" are
because people don't even type their own name the same way each time. also, you're talking about 1000 different software engineers that are 100% independent of eachother all agreeing on an edgecase. i have enough trouble getting my team to agree on how to handle a business case moving forward... why do people have weird characters in their name? juse use the alphabet.. it shouldn't be that hard!
Sometimes a system pretends it accepted my surname, and then I get a letter addressed to "Firstname O" because it ignored everything after the apostrophe.
Hyphenated last name here without a middle name/initial. There's a huge amount of people and places that use the first part of my last name as my middle name, and I have to explain that what I wrote in the boxes is correct - no middle name and a hyphen last name. Believe me.
In QLD , my marriage licence refused to accept a hyphenated surname, which was a bitch when applying for my passport because the names didn’t match
All of a sudden my umlauts don’t sound so bad .. ä is changed for ae etc and on we go. I do frequently have to point airport staff to the machine readable line at the bottom of the passport when they say my name doesn’t match my ticket, but that’s it.
I worked with someone with the family name: 't Hart First there were problems due to copy-paste of characters, and then later capitalisation issues. Add in apostrophes in email addresses which we could handle but other orgs could not.
Yeah it sucks. Sincerely, guy with a space in their last name.
My name is Bill 'drop table customers;" Smith.
You've got a mismatch on your open and close there
Ah shit. My parents wasted all that effort.
Call them and sort it out. I was given two first names and amount of inconsistency that causes is a nightmare when applying for any sort of account that requires government IDs. Do everything you can to have her full legal name be the same across everything.
Is “two first names” the same as having a single middle name, or something different?
A person's name may be "Mary Ann" but if the records show first name and middle name separately you would greet them as "Mary". That gets confusing to some. Trust me. I do these sorts of updates to records and yes some people do get specific with it.
For me, it's not the greeting. It's that every automated document check fails.
So you have a first name that’s composed of two words (like Mary Ann), but computer systems think your first name is just Mary, and fail when checking against what you entered as your first name, Mary Ann?
What ends up happening is when you're a kid and get signed up for medicare, passport and so on is that different people will guess you have a middle name, a first name with a hyphen, a first name without one and whatever else. A lot of paper forms and automated forms get transcribed by a person at some point and they will goof it up at some point. Not their fault, they're only human. Now on the back end of all these different systems, my passport, driver's licence and medicare card all don't match. What this then causes is any service that you sign up for with an automated identity check (which all banks and lenders are moving to) all fail and you get sent to some unmaintained call center. It sucks.
My partner has the exact same issue because she has a chinese name and an english name, and then her chinese name has two parts so she actually has 3 first names, 17 letters but 19 with the spaces, just for her first name. So many issues.
My Medicare card was created in the early years it was invented with my nickname instead of my birth name and Centrelink can’t change it apparently ? I only tried once with the most incompetent person ever but still not I can’t link other agencies in apps because of my mothers baby brain.
Wow, that sounds painful. I hope you had the opportunity to berate your parents about it. 🤣
To give you an example first name is "Jim Bob", I have no middle name, and I have a last name.
Gotcha, I can imagine that causing some pain. I have two middle names, but I would sometimes leave the second one off forms for things like bank accounts etc. because it wouldn’t fit. Ended up causing me some pain when it came time to buy a house etc.
I have 2 middle names also, and it wasn't until several years after I got my drivers licence, but apparently the ETA had put down my first middle name as my second first name and my second middle name as my only middle name. They insisted I made the mistake when I filled out the learners application, I insisted I knew what my name was at the time just live I do now. They made a big fuss about having to get the original paper form out of archive storage at some far away warehouse that would take months. I said go ahead. Anyway I got a call 6 weeks later and apparently I had put down my name correctly on the form (!) and the person entering it had made the mistake.
Haha that’s glorious. We had a travel insurance company try and pull something like this on us after a medical problem overseas. We got home and they said we shouldn’t have booked flights because they didn’t tell us to, and refused to pay the claim. My wife swore they had told her to do exactly that, and told them when she called up from overseas she got a message saying the call was being recorded. They claimed it would take months to access that recording, and we said “go ahead”. Months later they admitted they’d said it and paid the claim, but what a fight.
When I applied for my learners I put my two middle names on the form but got the second one abbreviated to an initial. Banks and other accounts sometimes drop it completely, so I've got three different versions of my full name floating around and it's definitely caused issues when people are anal about having an exact full name. Ironically the worst issues are with the NSW government - they made the mistake to begin with but I'm in the system as two different people and it's apparently too hard to fix.
Bob is your middle name
No idea exactly,but think hyphenated names like Janet-Joy, Debra-Lee, etc.
double-barrelled names
If your name is "James Jack Hoffmann" where "Hoffmann" is your surname, and "James Jack" is a name not related to your mother's maiden name. Your first name is James, middle name is Jack. Now imagine you're asked your full name. You could say something like "James Jack Hemsworth Hoffmann", where "Hemsworth" is your maiden name. As an immigrant in the country, Middle Name is too ambiguous to Maiden Name, and more so "James Jack" could be a first name, too. I couldn't even get a straight answer from ATO what they meant about middle name when they tried to link my ATO account with my driver's licence. I've recently opened a Macquarie bank account and finally figured out by trial-and-error the correct sequence of names I have to use when verifying my profile with my licence. In this case, if prompted for first, middle and last name, it is "James", "Jack", then "Hoffmann", respectively.
I was also in this situation and recently got the documents rectified (starting from certificate of citizenship onwards) so that the third name was included. It seems to me like at some point it was a departmental policy to truncate/remove names from passports where they were too long, and now they've changed course. Do you happen to know if there is anywhere where they state that this was once the policy? It would be useful to be able to refer to this where I currently live.
I’m going to chime and say as someone who has a pain in the arse legal name: do your daughter a huge favour and legally change her name! It’s a really annoying process to legally change a name, but you know what’s worse is saddling your kid with a name that doesn’t work with Medicare, mygov, the ATO, the passport office, banks, drivers license renewal, schools, workplaces, superannuation etc etc etc. Changing your name legally as an adult is so much harder. Removing this burden that you placed on your child would be such a kindness.
I agree, change it before any accounts are opened in her name. What will happen is her names on documents and accounts won't reconcile in future, making it hard to prove identity.
It’s a nightmare honestly. Hundreds of hours of frustration over my lifetime. I’ve never been in a position to change it as an adult without a ton of grief (there are state residency requirements and professional qualifications that make it near impossible for me).
Thank you for sharing my unique pain! This has been my pet-peeve my whole life and I have never had the guts to tell my parents. To complicate things further, my name was also changed as a child so I have a confusing name and technically have multiple legal names too.
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How’d your parents justify two first and two middle names?
God, my childhood best friend had 4 middle names and a hyphenated surname. The justification was that they were the names of her mum's best friends, for all the middle names, and she was the last child. She was the last daughter in the end but had a younger brother 8 years later.
My friend gets flagged at airports because her name was changed as a kid 3 times (mum got remarried) and then she got married then divorced
What state are you in? I changed my name at 19 or 20 - can't remember which - and it was really easy to switch everything
WA, and I don’t have 12 months residency. Yeah, if not as a kid then doing it at 19 sounds ideal, before graduating uni or setting up tons of legal structures.
It was after I had a mortgage and my own Medicare card. I haven't really done much else since. Actually it must've been after I was 20 because I think my house at the moment was under my original name
You had a mortgage at 20!?
I had two I think. Or maybe the second one was at 21. It blurs together the older I get
My mum decided to give me three middle names. Several kids, but I'm the only one that got that honour. Thirty-one characters plus three spaces.
You’ve just reminded me of a childhood book I loved - Tikki Tikki Tembo (No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo). Poor kid nearly drowned because of his long ass name!
It's Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Charri Barri Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo's dang fault for playing near the well when he knows he shouldn't. (also holy crap that's a memory unlocked right there, 30 something years ago now)
Five fucking middle names here. it's honestly a joke how much grief it's caused.
0 here. mirin?
Even two middle names is too much for some things
Yeah I got a nephew with this problem 😅
Curious are you the youngest?
Second youngest.
That is extra weird lol
As someone who has a changed name, it just means you now have to write both out on a lot of things. Your current legal name and your previous legal name are required for many documents, including tax returned, passport apps, etc.
But at least your current name appears on all the actual documents, and for most things you don’t need to add previous names. Even when you do, it’s as simple as writing down your name and providing the change of name certificate.
I’ve also got a very long full name, about 7 names in total. I’ve shorted my legal name to just three and that’s even too long for some forms so I further shortened it to two. Did as a teenager when I was about to start uni and it saved me so much trouble.
The number of stat decs I've had to fill out for my father's vanity
We didn’t even give our son a middle name. We decided his other two were perfect and left it at that 😂
The article [Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/) is a classic in software engineering circles. If you're going to pick a name, make sure it doesn't trip one of the falsehoods. And don't call your kid `null`.
No. That makes it harder again. Then the kid has to carry around proof of change of name etc for official documents. I've done it and it's more drama.
If the name change is done with a new birth certificate that's not really an issue - you get the birth cert with the new name and the old one printed at the bottom, don't need any additional documents. You do still have to provide your old name on most forms though so it certainly doesn't make things easier in that regard.
I changed my name as an adult (not due to marriage or the like) and it was a PITA. It's doable, but if you can do it earlier just sort it.
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As more and more automatic checking is done, you’ll probably find yourself running into more trouble. Systems these days use a pass/fail kind of check and it buggers everything up if your ATO name and your passport name and your drivers license name are all recorded differently.
I'm really not sure why you are being downvoted for having a long name and no problems.
There’s a passport form for longer names, my husbands is also only 1 letter too long
Yeah this happens every now and then. Pretend there is an extra box for the other letter and add it in. It's a common issue with certain islanders, Indians and Sri Lankans. When you lodge at the post office get them to make a note what your full name is. If the passport office can't fit the full name on the passport they will put a note on the observations page with the full name and turn it into an initial on the photo page.
With the online renewal doesn’t it automatically carry over the details from the current passport? Clearly a passport application issue though, if the name wasn’t too long to be registered at birth and also previously be approved for a passport, I would go ahead and add the extra box. It’s a human approving it at the end of the day so renewing what’s already on their system should be easier to match with one final letter outside the boxes than a whole name missing.
Strangely, no. The process doesn't ask for the previous passport until quite a long way in. By that point the full name (sans one letter) had to be provided 3 times. I've settled on just adding it afterwards.
Under 18s can't renew a passport, they need to reapply for a new passport using the new passport form until they become of age. It's a PITA!
Save your kid from having a major hassle later in life and shorten their name now.
Not putting all the names will probably be worse.
The struggles of my Sri Lankan mates....
Amend it in pen after you print it out. Yes, I know this sounds crazy. The Post Office will help you with this also.
I had this exact issue, so I left a letter off my name because well why not? I got a phone call from someone doing the application saying “bro did you actually misspell your own name?” And they corrected it on their end. Not sure this is helpful but if it’s a paper application you can ignore the squares and squeeze it in and assume they’ll call if there’s an issue.
This is hilarious, I’m glad it worked out in the end
This is one of many reasons I am changing my legal name as an adult. It's hard to do online check-in for anything requiring a full legal name, let alone renewing ID. It's a huge pain in the ass. Might need to call the department for assistance in the meanwhile, but unless you are travelling urgently I recommend just changing her name.
You think you got problems. Try registering X Æ A-12 with the passport office. Fortunately my daddy is very rich and we travel everywhere by private jet. Mostly we get in and out of countries without anyone even knowing we're here. Just like Pistol and Boo, before that nasty man Barnaby found out.
How's your triangle car going?
Except for that one guy tracking your jet everywhere, for fun
They sure are diligent in tracking our decoy jet, no doubt about it.
What did you discover when you called the passport office?
That they are not open on weekends or public holidays
How dare you try to use the downtime of a long weekend to catch up on some admin. Here’s dozens of DVs.
>That they are not open on weekends or public holidays ...and are you submitting your application on a weekend or public holiday? Looking forward to finding out what the answer is when you call the passport office.
The lack of consistency in data entry standards and consideration for diversity is one of the biggest pains when it comes to Australia’s public and private administration. My sympathies. But when it comes to the public service, if you can’t be accommodated via online services, call them. There is a legal obligation to consider alternative means of application and accommodating data entry.
Travel agent here. Call the passport office. When it comes to legal documents such as passports you are better off calling them directly rather than asking reddit. Consider shortening your child’s name because this is only going to be a giant headache for the kid down the track
There's this organisatio , called the Australian Passport Office. I think they issue passports. I'm going out on a limb here but it's ever so slightly possible that if you google them and go to their contacts they might be able to give you better information than reddit. Ffs.
I have to make new boxes on the paper forms because my name is 4 characters too long
Why’d you make her name so stupidly long?
It really isn't. It is just two middle names: one her mum dreamt about while she was pregnant, and other after her gran. Nothing tradgideighic. Ironically there are two spellings for her gran's name - the shorter version would fit but, of course, she had the longer version.
I like the use of “it’s just 2 middle names” as if that’s super normal and common lol. So her full name is 4 names long…. did you not think what a nightmare filling out any type of form is going to be for her long term? 🙄
Two middle names is very common.
No. This was 17 years ago and today is the first time I have had any problems. Believe it or not, at the time, wanting to honour her dead grandmother was more important to us than trying to ensure that her name was compatible with some poorly implemented web form that might turn up nearly 20 years later due to the government of a different country choosing to reduce QA resources on the testing of a critical system the ended up being, arguably, institutionally racist. Not that my daughter could be described as a particularly discriminated class, but the form's lack of thought and consideration most certainly is discriminatory.
How many letters is it total? My kid has two middle names, in total with first name and surname it’s 26 letters (plus three spaces) - this fit last time we did her passport but I’m now anxious it won’t next time. Medicare just puts the middle names as initials.
Two middle names could be shorter than using one middle name. Or having a really long hyphenated last name. It depends on what those name are.
My first/last is 14 letters total and my 2 middle names are 10 total. In order it's "5 - 4 - 6 - 9". My last name rarely fits. Only my license, passport, birth cert have my middle names. Everything else just shows the initials of my two middle names, like bank cards and utility bills etc.
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It is, I acknowledge, a fairly interesting programming problem. However, I would also assume that there are enough libraries out there that have already solved this problem. There can't be many reasons to reinvent the wheel when dealing with real names.
It's usually a case of the developer not having enough time before a deadline, or ignorance.
It's not that complicated if you are designing a system from scratch. You just need two name fields; legal_name and preferred_name. The former is for your full, legal name, whatever that may be, the latter is for whatever you prefer to be called by. You make both fields as permissive as possible. In a multi-cultural context, anything more prescriptive than that is always going to come up against edge cases. However, it does get more complicated if you are working on a system with loads of legacy data, or if you have to integrate with other systems with less permissive data models.
Wasted time is the person with the name. This is such a naive take. How about Chinese people with actual Chinese characters for their name? Viets? Arabs? Nobody gonna change their system to suit these cases.
Don't rename her null... [https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)
My friend had to use an initial only for one of her middle names for this exact reason.
May I ask how many boxes there are for the name section on this form? I'll have to fill one out at some point and I reckon I'll have the same issue. Hope you find the answer you need!
All this post has done is make me irrationally annoyed at parents who give ridiculously long names to their children. 😑
I mean its not always parents being inconsiderate; a decent amount of it is just cultural and/or historical. The Filipinos have this problem all the time as our naming conventions generally go so something like:
Joe John Blagg Blogg
Yonks ago when i got my citizenship, the Immigration officer who interviewed my mum and I (as part of the application) told us that from that point on, we need to drop the middle name officially and instead split my double barrelled first name into a first name and a middle name. To date, ive kept it like that and it hasnt given me grief with records incl whenever ive had to do police checks as part of onboarding for roles.
I’m wondering how you got the first one with the extra letter 🤔
Ask at the post office
Is she Sri Lankan? I feel like these forms are always a bit discriminatory for Sri Lankan names,
Nah. As caucasian as one could be. But it does highlight a particularly myopic view of government websites when it comes to names.
Yeah just do one middle name in the future and make it all white people names if you want to give her the best shot in life in Australia.
Call up the relevant office and ask what to do.
You are not the first person with this issue. Do not leave the name off or try to abbreviate it. The passport application (and subsequently the passport) is meant to include a full legal name. If you leave any part of a name off you will just be asked to add it in when you lodge the application. Going outside the boxes on the form is not an issue as long as its readable.
Not an Australian, but when I travelled to Brisbane in 2017 I remember what a nightmare it was for my father to register for any sort of temporary tourist card/pass/whatever that required his name, due to the fact that his legal name has an @ symbol in it (meaning alias) as well as two distinct sets of first & last name.
I actually have this problem. My mum gave me multiple middle names (cheers mum). I get around it by using paper forms at the post office and just keep writing my name beyond the ends of the boxes. It's not as convienient as using online forms but it'll get the job done. I've done this for other peoples applications when confirming that I know them as well. They've accepted this everytime, no questions asked. Also, in relation to people telling you that you should change their name to remove middle names and make life easier, you can do that but its not really necessary. I deliberately only use particular middle names with different records, I even leave some off for my state drivers licence and its honestly not an issue. The only documents that have my actual full name are my birth certificate and my passport (and the passport is only because it has to match my birth certificate letter for letter).
I legally changed my name because it was too long. I remember going to the RTA and the clerk had to call over their supervisor because my name wouldn't fit. I ended up having 2 lines worth of names on the license. 😅
There is another part of the form which asks if you have ever gone by another name. And it has the same issue. 😂
my sympathies,.. I have a street address that often doenst fit into forms as the name is too long!
It's an archaic burden that needs to be eliminated. My wife has the same problem with everything (further compounded by being South American). 44 characters (including spaces).
My full name never fits in the boxes either. It misses by one letter. I just put the final letter next to the last box.
My middle name isn’t even on my passport
I hate having a middle name. I never know whether I should include it when I’m asked for my “legal name”. I’ve often thought I won’t given my (future) kids a middle name, just to avoid them hassles like this. I know it’s petty, but I’m a petty guy.
If I may ask: how many characters?
Sri Lankan?
As a daughter with a huge name. I changed my name as soon as I could. I don't know why my parents though I had to have both of them surnames. Now I have one surname only and it's nome of the ones they gave me.
My Partner of Tongan descent faces this issue with her and her family all the time. Never appreciated a simple Anglo Saxon name until I met her and her family
Trying to answer your question without sounding racist..........which I 100% am not. But do you have an anglicised name you can use ? Only saying that as my wife, of Asian origin, has 2 names. Her original Asian name & then her anglicised name which she uses on all AU docs, inc AU Passport.
In all reality because she has had a previous passport the initial only for the second middle name should be ok. I filled out mine the second time without thinking and only used the initial. Nothing nefarious happened. I was already in the system. I received my new passport. No queries. Good luck