Culturally Responsive Programming: Let me have my apostrophe!
For years I have had the policy of only making donations to organizations that spell my name correctly. If I get address labels in the mail that do not include the apostrophe in my last name they get shredded. If the organization spells my name correctly, they get a few bucks.
Today was the last straw. I was unable to buy a beautiful big floppy hat from Zappos unless I spelled my name wrong. This offense is just one in many years worth of offenses where customer service representatives will not acknowledge me, or I cannot schedule car maintenance, or I am greeted with an eye roll as I spell my last name D.e.l.l. apostrophe, capital A…
For all of us with names like Dell’Angelo, D’Amico, O’Donnell, O’Malley, Sa’ad or any other name (and there are many) that contain that beautiful little apostrophe — it is time to stand up to culturally insensitive software that insist we misspell our name in order to make appointments, place orders, or sign up for anything.
This is clearly a problem of the computer age. Back when I was a kid and everything was written on paper there were no problems. My apostrophe flew high and proud. The trouble began with data entry and computer systems refusing to accept the punctuation in my name. And, upon insisting your name is spelled correctly you are typically met with a sneer from good old Joe Williams who does not understand why you want to insist on having punctuation in your name. We can’t really blame this on computers though, because ultimately there are real people doing the programming who are making the decision not to include code that will accept my name. It could be that these programmers have no knowledge of this name anomaly. Could it be that there is no one who works in programming with a similar issue that might say, “Hey, the way we are doing this excludes me and my entire family and cultural identity!”? Possibly. But even if that were true there must be millions of complaints that have been lodged over the past twenty years or so, right?
The part that gets me is that I know it is possible to accept my name as it is intended to be written. I know this because some systems take it. And the systems that take it aren’t huge companies with endless resources. I have found that the places that will accept my name are some small local shops. Unlike my MasterCard where if I spell my name correctly while trying to shop on line I immediately get an error message.
Another offense is people, companies, software, etc. just deciding that my apostrophe can just be replaced with a dash. Punctuation is punctuation, they suppose. Except that has caused a lot of identity theft/credit problems for me. As you can pull up my credit report and see my name listed as Dell-Angelo, Angelo, T. Dell, Tabitha Angelo, and several other variations that have obtained credit to buy plane tickets, mobile phones and open various accounts. No one is exactly sure who Mr. Angelo is but every three years or so he pops up and lives large.
To be sure, this might seem small compared to a lot of other very serious problems in this world. But this is a piece of our identity. It is a name. For some of us a last name and for some a first name and technology is saying that our name does not matter. Those that program that technology are deciding that whatever value, culture, and identity is wrapped up in our name is less important than whatever it takes to program in an apostrophe.
Personally, I have had it. I am going to begin the process of insisting that my name is spelled correctly. If your system does not accept the correct spelling of my name I will not have an account with you. I know I will have to brace myself for the eye rolls and some attitude. But, if my name is spelled correctly and the same across all my accounts that makes my life easier, protects me from fraud and maintains the important tie I feel to my family history and my name.