I have an 'æ' in my middle name (formally secondary first name because history reasons). Usually I just don't use it, but it's always funny when a payment form instructs me to write my full name exactly as written on my credit card, and then goes on to tell me my name is invalid.

I live in Łódź.

Love receiving packages addressed to ??d? :)

As you may be aware, the name field for credit card transactions is rarely verified (perhaps limited to North America, not sure).

Often I’ll create a virtual credit card number and use a fake name, and virtually never have had a transaction declined. Even if they are more aggressively asking for a street address, giving just the house number often works. This isn’t a deep cover but gives a little bit of a anonymity for marketing.

The government of Ireland has many IT systems that cannot handle áccénted letters. #headdesk

Still much better when it fails at the first step. I once got myself in a bit of a struggle with Windows 10 by using "ł" as part of Windows username. Amusingly/irritatingly large number of applications, even some of Microsoft's own ones, could not cope with that.

"Write your name the way it's spelled in your government issued id" is my favorite. I have three ids issued by two governments and no two match letter by letter.

My wife had two given names and no surname. (In fact, before eighth class, she only had one given name.) Lacking a surname is very common in some parts of India. Also some parts of India put surname first, and some last, and the specific meaning and customs vary quite a bit too. Indian passports actually separate given names and family names entirely (meaning you can’t reconstruct the name as it would customarily be written). Her passport has the family name line blank. Indigo writes: “Name should be as per government ID”, and has “First And Middle Name” and “Last Name” fields. Both required, of course. I discovered that if you put “-” in the Last Name field, the booking process falls over several steps later in a “something went wrong, try again later” way; only by inspecting an API response in the dev tools did I determine it was objecting to having “-” in the name. Ugh. Well, I have a traditional western First Middle Last name, and from putting it in things, sometimes it gets written First Middle Last and sometimes Last First Middle, and I’ve received some communications addressed to First, some to Last, and some to Middle (never had that happen before!). It’s a disaster.

Plenty of government things have been digitalised in recent years too, and split name fields tend to have been coded to make both mandatory. It’s… disappointing, given the radical diversity of name construction across India.

Did you actually get banks to print that on your credit card?

I’m impressed, most I know struggle with any kind of non-[A-Z]!