I Bear Many Names

Another thing about this blood drive is that I may have messed up my ID card forever.

The person doing my intake asked me to confirm the spelling of my name (possibly a new security measure to ensure that people don't go pretending to be other people in order to donate wicked gay blood or something), and I told her how my name was spelled.

With the apostrophe and everything. About a million years ago when I first got a Red Cross ID card, it was just Allyn, because the system didn't do apostrophes, I guess. Many don't.

Take the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. Can't do the apostrophe. My actual name is not actually on my legally valid government-issued ID! Nor is the actual name of anyone called, say, O'Houlihan. These are the burdens we, the Apostrophized, have learned to bear.

Anyway, she said she could change it, so she did, and then later I overheard from a distance her telling someone that I needed a new card because my name had a hyphen in it. I had just been partially drained of blood, and was preparing to worry about evil robot puppies, so I didn't have the energy to get up and go say anything. She might have meant apostrophe, and just said hyphen by mistake.

So I don't know what the new card will look like, or if it will match whatever is now in the Red Cross system, but if the new blood drive rules call for character-by-character validation of all names, and it turns out that there's not a match, I hope I don't get banned for life from donating because it looks like I'm trying to sneak dangerous blood in under cover of alias.

Also, I'm not sure how I feel about a hyphen. Does it spell something closer to, or farther away from, my actual name? It is an weird character, which is a plus since so am I, but does it also give the correct sense of my overwhelming awesomeness?

But another point of all this is that sometimes one goes along politely accepting inaccuracy because one assumes the system can't handle the truth, but then it turns out that it's possible to just put in an apostrophe. (Maybe.)

Anyway, perhaps this review of my many trials and tribulations will make it clear why I am so adamantly opposed to variant spellings of journal titles and author names. That's right: it's personal.

My being a cataloger is total coincidence.

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