[gambiting]

>>it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating

How so? Other than a funny coincidence, how would that ever come up anywhere in anything unless you both lived in a tiny community where everyone knows each other. I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".

[wisemang]

An ex-gf of mine’s dad had the same name and birthday as a convict. Caused him plenty of trouble when crossing the border apparently. Hopefully that’s not the case for GP

[slyn]

Used to work as a manager at a pizza place and we had a guy apply to deliver who had the same name as... their son.

Allegedly Jr. had a lengthy record including some drug offenses and something like a DUI / DWI. Naturally Sr. And Jr's records got crossed since they have the same First, Last, and Address, which caused Sr. many headaches including that we required a driving record check that would fail on a DUI / DWI.

[torben-friis]

>I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".

Because, lacking a national identity number, the natural way to distinguish to people in a system when the name wouldn’t do is going to be age/birthdate or location.

[tracker1]

Try it sometime... My name is somewhat common, but not even close to "John Smith" common... but even at about 1:20,000 or so I've seen a few conflicts just from my name. Another me was born the same day in the state I reside in... I've had a few things on my credit history get tangled up over it.

I've also met two others with the same name, purely coincidentally, not related. I worked on an access/security software team at a major bank (about 350k employees internationally at the time), I found 3 bugs just by being me. Since even SSN/Tax-Id varied, there were several ways to match identity and I had conflicts in a couple of them with other employees. Last Name + last-4 of tax/ssn/national-id (for whatever country the employee was in) was one of them. I don't recall the other two right now, been about 15 years.

[cm2012]

Birthdate and place of birth are used as identifiers (I have been asked what hospital/city I was born in before on paperwork).