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by cronopios 3568 days ago
At my uni there is a student (from India, IIRC) that doesn't have any surname.

Some of our software didn't like that, so we checked her passport, and sure enough, her full name was merely her first name.

1 comments

Oh man, I really feel for her. Dealing with the various immigration agencies must have been a nightmare. I bet they ended up officially changing her name to "Firstname Firstname", which is what we tend to do in the states..

This bugs me, because if a name is supposed to be a unique identifier, then part of it's existence is to feed the ego. "This is ME! I am Jean Valjean!"

When you then you change somebody's name to fit your short-sighted database constraints you're pretty much saying, "You don't matter as much as our programmers' decisions matter, now move along 9430"