pogma

My name is O’Gorman, that is an apostrophe and a capital G. It is not Ogorman, nor is my middle initial O.

Tried to buy travel insurance today, it took 45 minutes before we gave up, the computer system the agent was using wouldn’t accept the apostrophe in my name. This is in Japan, they happily accept names requiring 2 byte fonts, but ‘ is unacceptable? I must admit that I’ve had this problem before, trying to give money to unicef Japan, it would not accept my name, but gave a useless error, because the apostrophe is used to delimit sql queries and the web designer never took into account that someone’s name may contain one.

It isn’t hard to do, it just requires a little thought on the part of the application designer, accept “odd” chars in names.

While I’m ranting, I may as well continue:

1) Do not ask for a zip/postal code and then validate the input against some US database, informing me uselessly that my (quite valid japanese code) is wrong.

2) If your company accepts international orders, use the same form for everyone, don’t make me go to some “special” page.

3) If you don’t accept international orders, tell me so before I get to the checkout page.
I’d better stop now, or I’ll be up half the night on this rant.