Most of my life I’ve been a Warren. When my wife and I got married we decided to take each others names and my last name became Keck-Warren. My assumption was that it would be hard to get the DMV to change my license but then I would be on my way.

But I was wrong. It turns out that it was easier to get some of my socially conservative family members to understand than it was to get some computer systems.

Why This is Stupid

People have crazy names and if you create a barrier that prevents then from signing up because their last name has a space or a hyphen they’ll go somewhere else. It also causes all kinds of information mismatches between sites and systems.

Insurance

I had to visit a hospital for a couple tests right after I changed my name and their computer systems didn’t accept hyphenated last names. I was shocked that a hospital’s computer system wouldn’t allow the hyphen. We were able to move on through the process by removing the hyphen but the real problem started when they tried to bill my insurance. My insurance had a hyphen in my last name but the hospital didn’t. Because of this mismatch it caused my insurance to reject the claim.

This was strike on against this hospital and I haven’t been back.

Site Registration

Several times over the last couple years I’ve tried to sign up at various websites only to be told that my last name isn’t valid. My first fix is to remove the hyphen and that usually fixes the problem.

What You Can Do To Help

Test your sites signup process with common last name “oddities” things like Keck-warren, O’Connor, “van der Wall”, and McDonald. Test with non-latin names like Авандеев and قذافي‎. Everything you can do to make sure new users can get in because the rest of us non-alpha character last name people will thank you and you might end up with a few more customers.