More things I'm begging people to do, this time with no apologies:

[conuly]

If you have any influence or control at all over the people who run a database with people's names, please please please do whatever you can to make sure they accept hyphens and apostrophes. This is 2022! You don't need to be so stingy with what are, in fact, pretty common aspects of a lot of people's names!

My sister should not have spent half this day arguing with the hospital over whether or not the name Anne-Marie properly contains a fucking hyphen.

Comments

[hudebnik]

I live in Queens, NY, as do at least a million other people, and most of those people have hyphens in their street addresses: "123-45 Sixth Avenue". It's a logical system, indicating transparently that the address is on Sixth Avenue, about halfway between 123rd and 124th Streets. But a remarkable number of name-and-address databases, including some at USPS and some at major companies headquartered in New York City, choke on a hyphen in the street-number field.

[thekumquat]

Britain has the same problem - I used to work at 3-8 Whitehall Place, which caused no end of problems. I note it's now being called 3 Whitehall Place, which makes sense. But many Scots have problems with their addresses, written 3/12 X Close, as many databases can cope with hyphens or apostrophes but not slashes...