Nothing on the level of inconvenience that man experiences, but the other day I went to the Argos to buy some stuff and they have a new system where they ask you to input your first name as an identifier for your order.
So I entered mine, which is "stassa", and ... I got an error message saying my "memorable word is invalid". I got a screenshot and all:
The error message says "Sorry, your memorable word is invalid; please enter a different word".
So I entered "alice" and that was accepted. I guess, they originally had a message prompting the user for a "memorable word" not to enter their "first name". I didn't try it because I was in a hurry but I bet their system is setup to accept only dictionary words, but then they realised that most people will just enter whatever comes to their mind and often fail to match the dictionary that (I assume) the Argos developers have chosen as "standard".
So now they're asking people to enter their names... and that also fails because people often have names that are not in the dictionary. Like mine that just happens to be foreign (for the UK; it's a Greek name).
I just imagine the looks of confusion on people called Sandeep (not a British English dictionary word) or LaRonda (not one either) or Marek (also not) etc. "But, it says my name is invalid. What do I do?".
Automation, eh?
Edit: I wasn't buying what's partly showing on the left of the image, btw :)
To this day I can't create an e-mail account on outlook.com with my full name as local part because Microsoft has a profanity filter and my lastname (that is my username here) contains a forbidden word "nude". Even though I was using the French version where "nude" isn't even a word here.
The worst part is that Outlook only told me that the full email address was "invalid", and that's by trying every frigging combination that I figured out that the "nude" part was the problem. If I were to remove only the letter "u", everything goes fine and the address is created. But who wants to have an address with a butchered lastname that would just create more confusion when spelling it.
I tried to contact Microsoft support by chat or forum, but most of the people either didn't understand or replied they couldn't bypass this profanity filter.
You think that is bad, imagine having a name that has an apostrophe and an accented character. I think it's a few times a month a friend of mine complains about not being able to use their name.
So I entered mine, which is "stassa", and ... I got an error message saying my "memorable word is invalid". I got a screenshot and all:
https://imgur.com/a/En4dBQO
The error message says "Sorry, your memorable word is invalid; please enter a different word".
So I entered "alice" and that was accepted. I guess, they originally had a message prompting the user for a "memorable word" not to enter their "first name". I didn't try it because I was in a hurry but I bet their system is setup to accept only dictionary words, but then they realised that most people will just enter whatever comes to their mind and often fail to match the dictionary that (I assume) the Argos developers have chosen as "standard".
So now they're asking people to enter their names... and that also fails because people often have names that are not in the dictionary. Like mine that just happens to be foreign (for the UK; it's a Greek name).
I just imagine the looks of confusion on people called Sandeep (not a British English dictionary word) or LaRonda (not one either) or Marek (also not) etc. "But, it says my name is invalid. What do I do?".
Automation, eh?
Edit: I wasn't buying what's partly showing on the left of the image, btw :)