I'm guessing my Librarian friends will appreciate this

[mattlistener]

(Name changed for privacy.)

So I went looking for the Employee ID of Anne Brindle Cady in our HR system to create an account. (All accounts get paired with their EID -- my idea.)

I couldn't find it listed under Cady, and asked the requester to tell me what it is (implying, if you haven't told HR about her, you'd better get on it!).

Requester gets back with the number. Huh. I look it up, and find it under "Brindle Cady, Anne". I send a note to the relevant HR person pointing out the mistake, saying that sure makes it hard to find this person by full name.

They reply that Anne says her last name is in fact "Brindle Cady", so that's how it went into the system.

!!!

According to that way of thinking, it's possible for two people to have full names that are written identically in every way, but who have different last names!

Anne Brindle Cady (with a last name of "Brindle Cady", alphabetizing under "B") and...
Anne Brindle Cady (with a last name of "Cady" and middle name "Brindle", alphabetizing under "C")

Comments

[darxus.livejournal.com]

Ack. I'd be real tempted to refuse to record her name that way without a hyphen.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I believe that's a common form for Spanish names: "Personalname Father'sfamily Mother'sfamily". See, for instance, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose surname is "Garcia Marquez", or Mario Vargas Llosa, "Vargas Llosa".

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Double-barrelled surnames (unhyphenated) aren't unknown in the English-speaking world, either: witness David Lloyd George, Arthur Conan Doyle.

I share Matt's annoyance, though -- it seems like the burden's on the person with the pattern-breaking name to hyphenate it if she wants it parsed correctly.

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

According to that way of thinking, it's possible for two people to have full names that are written identically in every way, but who have different last names!

And that way of thinking is correct. How a name is spelled is determined by the person who bestows the name, and the person who holds it - nobody else should legitimately be allowed any input. That spelling can include letters, spaces, and other characters, as well as capitalization. My last name includes a hyphen, and a capital letter after the hyphen - to spell it otherwise is just plain incorrect. Various (primarily Irish & Scots) names have apostrophes and capitalizations after the first letter - to spell them otherwise is incorrect. A pet peeve of mine (which existed long before I had a hyphenated last name) is computer and other record-keeping systems that make assumptions about what makes up a valid name. I can understand the system truncating a name at a certain point - it's not unreasonable to say "because of the way our system is set up" (primarily for printing, but there are other possible valid reasons as well) "surnames or given names longer than X letters will be truncated at X letters." But it's annoying as anything for me to have to guess which letter my name might be alphabetized under, or deal with a computer system and have to guess whether it wants a hyphen, a space or no space between the two parts of my surname, and there's no good reason why I should have to, beyond "the computer won't let me put a hyphen in" or "I didn't think all that was your last name."

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Ok -- a very fair point. I certainly don't want to dictate what peoples' last names are. I do want to have deterministic alphabetization. If "Anne Brindle Cady" alphabetizes under B and "Anne Brindle Cady" alphabetizes under C, because of a difference between the two names that cannot be seen, that breaks the determinism.

I would prefer to explain to Ms. Brindle Cady that yes, we know your last name is Brindle Cady, but strictly speaking our system doesn't alphabetize by "last name", but rather by "last portion of the full name separated by whitespace".

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

A better safeguard would be to have the system ask "You've just entered a [space, special character, number] in the surname. Are you sure this is correct?" Making assumptions are fine in order to prevent errors, but the system needs to be robust enough to handle it when you come across a name that doesn't match your assumptions.

I don't have sympathy for new systems that truncate names in the record, but realize that there are applications where long names will get truncated - there's only so much room on a credit card, for example. In addition, there are plenty of legacy systems that haven't been upgraded since the days of 80-column punch cards.

[queue.livejournal.com]

Why should you ever be in the position of having to alphabetize someone's name, though? Wouldn't it make sense for requests to come to you in the form ", [middle name/initial]"? Or, to account for multi-word first names. stick in another comma after the first name.

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Well, the reason would be that a manager puts in a natural-language request that someone be given an account, and then I need to look up their employee ID in a system that's alphabetical by last name. And come to think of it it has a pathetic search function. So if I search for "Cady" and the last name is "Brindle Cady", I won't find it amongst the other "Ca" last names. This happened to me on Friday, hence the rant.

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

Random and unrelated question:

Do you still do massage therapy for outside clients? I have been told that I might have a pinched sciatic nerve. Its been causing me consistent pain for almost a year now. I have a physical schedules in September with my PC. But I don't really want to wait till September to get rid of the pain.

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

Hi LizO, and yes I do! If you have muscle tension in your hips and thighs it could well be the cause of sciatic pain, in which case massage therapy would be a direct treatment. My rate is $75 for a full 60 minutes on the table, and my office is near Teele Square in Somerville. Email me if you'd like to discuss more, or set up a time! mattlistener at livejournal.com.