A bit of a tangent: I know someone whose last name is "Tester" whose medical records were always getting filled with wild diseases and eventually they figured out that the doctors-in-training were practicing entering medical records using her account.
A common source of "NULL" strings are CSVs. I personally had to deal with a database that only understood NULLs correctly when using QUOTE_NOTNULL, which was added to Python just last year: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/113732
I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)
> I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)
Sorry, I don't buy that one. There's no way the ascii string "eof" - especially lower-cased - would be interpreted as the C macro EOF, which is typically represented as the int -1. Sounds like a tall tale unless you've got proof.
There are more than a few legacy databases where a person's first name wouldn't be lowercased. I worked for a university awhile back, this is post-2010, and names were stored uppercase.
I could see a poorly coded stringly parsed interface (think sql) triggering on a mid span character sequence. but I agree, it would have to be a real mess of an interface. For example the client uses "eof" to separate or end queries.
I first had to figure out why the G stayed put if it was being treated as last line... I've seen some terrible things and wouldn't doubt that a lot of pages in say the travel industry have a 2%+ failure rate at recording a signup.
I could see it happening with clumsy JSON parsing. in javascript, JSON.parse("null") would return null, and the string null would have to be JSON.parse('"null"').
My Glassdoor dummy account is something like Mr Null at 001 null drive. I’m amazed the feedback from the null corporation I get. There are a lot of other employees who appear to work there. Work seems pointless. Dead end. A clear lack of direction. Lots of dead ends.
We had a patient with a single letter as surname.
Didn't go well with our patient web portal. She'll probably never be able to see her MRIs online since development is slow, and it seems to be an edge case.
I have several Indian coworkers who have a single name. Our company systems insist on first and last names, so they either end up with '.' as a last name, or the same name twice.
Is the name "O"? That's a common Korean surname, though many Korean Americans spell it "Oh" to avoid the problems computers and bureaucrats have with it.
Well, challenge question "secret answers" also have similar stupids. Mandating five-letter answers mean that first pet Fido, favorite teacher Zak, honeymoon destination Fiji, etc all cannot be used. Though honest answers to those questions are the worst idea.
We had 2 systems, one for students, one for staff. Sometimes people would forget to properly reference the 'other' account when a teacher took a class, or a student taught a community education class, etc. We were in the process of consolidating into a single DB, and didn't want a bunch of duplicates.
We had a person Leslie that kept getting duplicated in the systems. Same address same age, same birthdate. Only difference was different gender, and last 2 digits of social was 21 instead of 12.
So our dba deleted one, and linked them.
Month later, same thing. So our DBA fixed it. Shaking his head at the people up front not following data entry procedures.
Next week, both Leslie's were in our office. They were born on same day, but hospitals in nearby towns. Back then socials were handed out sequentially by region. They had different last names until they married 40 years before.
They were laughing and said this happens more often then most people would think.
i now know the phone number that i will use whenever some form wants a number and i don't think they really need it. 555-1212 is my go to, but 338-6855 is so less obvious.
Who's at the other end of that number. No one who had the number appreciated the pop song's 867-5309 but at least one day with the radio on told them why they were getting all these crank calls.
I doubt any of the people collecting phone numbers as an identifier are actually making any calls. They use it as the ID to link all of your data collected by them by anyone else that buys that data to other data they've bought from other suppliers.
In fact, if that is a legit number, then all I'm doing is increasing their rewards points or whatever. Sure, maybe messing with their recommendations like when you share your Spotify account, but that's a whole lot of meh from me on that.
And: What Happens When Your License Plate Says 'NO PLATE'? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/auto-no-plate/ (including a mention of a "VOID" plate)
A bit of a tangent: I know someone whose last name is "Tester" whose medical records were always getting filled with wild diseases and eventually they figured out that the doctors-in-training were practicing entering medical records using her account.