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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
Ah-well, I saved some money because of this.
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.