> Even better, when I was a kid and I got my first official document, the national healthcare card, the software in use did not allow a space character in the first name. The operator then decided to add a hyphen to enter the two parts of my name as separate words.

On virtually every airline ticket for which I provided my first and middle name it was just concatenated.

For example: I would provide

Frank John Sample as my name it appears as

FRANKJOHN SAMPLE on the ticket

Old reservation and ticketing systems, indeed.

Only United does this to me.

Yeah, I have a two-word last name. It sometimes gets smushed together by the airlines, but they're inconsistent about it.

Lufthansa for example does this in a particularly annoying way, if I give my name as LAST NAME, it will automatically smush it to LASTNAME. However, if I then want to retrieve my boarding pass, it will only find my booking when I enter my name as LASTNAME, because the look-up does not smush things automatically.

Tbf, as much as anything that's probably the lawyer doing their job properly as much as it being a necessity for the application.

About to say, why are they complaining about the lawyer being good at their job and possibly saving them (or their heirs) massive headaches and legal fees down the road?

I was not complaining at all, I am just saying that I have to sign with an hyphen because of some historical software limitation.

On the other side of this it seems that every single airline disallows hyphens in last names and always either replaces it with a space, or removes the hyphen to have the last name all one word.

I have four names: two middle-names (one was added in my childhood, when my grandfather died). No bank is prepared to acknowledge this - I'm only allowed a single middle-name.

Four names isn't really a lot; some German aristocrats (or their descendants) have 6 or 7 names, and it's quite customary for Arabs to list a shedload of their ancestors in their name (e.g. Ahmed bin this bin the-other bin whoever).

> the layer asked me to sign with the hyphen

s/layer/lawyer/

That's nuts. If a signature is anything, it's the way you customarily write your name. Fortunately my signature is unreadable, and nobody could tell whether I'd written a hyphen or not. I suggest acquiring worse handwriting (good handwriting is almost useless these days).

Sorry for the typo.

The lawyer even insisted that the hyphen had to be clearly visible in the signature. I think that in those types of documents in Italy you are legally required to use a readable signature, because I bought/sold house a number of times as family grew, and every time different lawyers always insisted on this aspect.

In my country official transliteration to the latin alphabet has changed like 3 or 4 times over past 20 years. I had to change my perfectly valid and legal drivers license recently to make it match my passport. And I have a very simple first and last names, some people are still having issues with horrible mandated transliterations and mismatching documents. Fun.

Out of curiosity, which country is that?

Ukraine

Now I understand, I work with some Ukranians and they often have similar but slightly different names (Oleks, Olehk, Maria, Mariia).

I have three official first names but the second is the spoken first name — a practice not uncommon in Sweden. I use only the spoken first name for most things, but all three are present in e.g. healthcare and social security databases: where the spoken name is supposed to be underlined. But the underlining often gets lost when transferred between systems, and some systems even strips away all but the first.

My last name is spelled with a double-s by one side of the family, but with a single s by the other. I've been refused to pick up packages at the mail-parcel centre only because the spelling on the parcel did not match my ID card, despite having a notice slip with delivery number that had been delivered correctly to my physical mail address.