As best I can follow, I agree. What's up with the capital R?
It was a typo that I decided to retain.
What's with the 1 between "course" and the end parenthesis?
That wasn't a typo because I did it deliberately!@!!11!
My editor self cringes at the question mark before the colon. The other item I would flag had this been sent to my desk for QC:
"a predetermined list. (For instance: intersections in a city.) Otherwise"
At a minimum, I would edit it to:
"a predetermined list (for instance: intersections in a city). Otherwise"
I would also recommend replacing "for instance:" with "e.g.,". You're welcome.
I think it's a cell-phone issue -- entering numbers on the keypad while talking on the phone is a hassle in a way that it wasn't in the dark ages of curly cords and handsets.
In theory, I can see places where it would work. For instance, cinema tickets. Odeon (the big chain in the UK) has a national booking line, so it's in principle much easier for them to ask you to speak the name of the cinema than for them to go through the whole list. And even with films at an individual cinema, it would often take a long time to go through the whole list. In practice, of course, the voice recognition is terrible, so it takes forever anyway, or you get so pissed off you go online. Which may be the point.
I think it's a cell-phone issue -- entering numbers on the keypad while talking on the phone is a hassle in a way that it wasn't in the dark ages of curly cords and handsets.
Yeah, it's less easy, but it doesn't bother me; besides, we had that whole period of cordless phones that had the keys on the handset rather than on the ... whatever the other part of the phone is called.
In similar typo news, I just wrote 'exegesis' in a letter to a judge, wrote another sentence, looked back at it and thought "I meant exigencies, didn't I?" That would have puzzled her if I hadn't fixed it, I'll bet.
It's "in similar (typo news)", not "in (similar typo) news".
The good news is that this system is so bad that companies have to build in an easy way to escape the phone tree. I've found that repeatedly mashing 0 will often get you transferred to a human.
Well maybe LB should have made that clear. You can understand why I was so confused. The typos actually seem quite dissimilar, as far as typos go.
12: Selecting dos para español also often lets you escape to humans, but I don't think we're supposed to tell the anglophones about that one.
It would be of limited utility for the likes of me anyway.
15: "Pulsus tres latinae."
(Translation courtesy of Google.)
There's a fair chance I dreamed this but I think I read an article at some point about voice recognition programs being fine-tuned to recognize intonations of anger and pass you off to a human being before you become a seething mass of homicidal rage.
16.last: "Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."
Someone, I think Tweety, has told me that multiple times as well. (So if I had to wager a guess, I'd think the article was in the NYer. Which means at least several other people here must have read it. oudemia, what issue was it, off the top of your head?) I'm not sure I've ever encountered a program that could recognize such a thing, but I may be underestimating just how angry one's voice can get.
I too have heard such things, and also heard that they recognize bad words, yet my dispassionate recitals of "fuck fuck shit fuck you assholes fuck fuck" rarely result in me being transferred to a human. (Rarely, but not never!)
For a good while, the angrier I get, the more saccharine my intonation gets, and the more formal and polite I get.
The one time I've raised my voice with one of those systems (which had me recite a fucking phone number) it did transfer me, but that may have resulted from an excess of failures.
16/18/19
Also sometimes effective (when speaking with hapless frontline humans): "I'm an 'irate', can you please escalate this call to a Level Two or Three?"
Hearing unexpected facility with call center lingo can startle them into compliance.
It's also 'interesting' if you have an accent. As per the Burnistoun lift clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
Can we have a hurricane thread? Like, why are no websites of transportation services I plan to use tomorrow morning listing any sort of information about what time they project they might shut down?
Transportation services make it a practice to never provide information on expected delays and interruptions. Why should hurricanes be different?
25: Unless you are heading south from your presumed location in central New Jersey you should be OK tomorrow morning.
28: I have a westbound flight half an hour before noon. It looks like the trains will be running to get me to the airport, but I'm not sure how confident I am in Newark dealing with rain....
It always makes me smile when Google Ireland's recorded greeting directs me to google.co.uk. Here are some angry customers in return for 800 years of oppression!
Here's the current Newark Airport forecast for Saturday:
Showers and thunderstorms, mainly after noon. High near 82. East wind between 3 and 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible.
Although now that I see the "hype" I think congestion-related delays and "we're all going to die" prep might impact you.
I wish phone lines just went away, and you could IM help lines.
Yes, this is a real anti-pattern. We keep telling our clients that they could do so much better with their voice systems, but there's a hell of a lot of idiots out there. For example, every call centre in the world tracks the average hold time as a management KPI in order to flog the galley slaves harder when it rises. Some of them even show it on a big LED screen over the cubicle farm.
But when was the last time you dialled into some organisation's call centre and the IVR told you how long you could expect to wait, so you could make a sensible decision whether to hold on the line or jack it in and do something less pointless? (Actually, the only one I've ever met was our national telco's, while my old boss was a director. They took it away again after he fell out of favour.)
I was once invited to a HugeTechCo involved in call centres and telco billing's customer conference. It was like going to a meeting of Nazi aeroengine production managers - I expected someone to suggest introducing Leistungsernährung at any moment. (That was also the one where I horrified their CTO by knowing SPARQL.)
The only sane people in that industry are T-Mobile UK (they don't pay the call centre staff by throughput but by first-call resolution) and these people, who are brilliant and deserve to be richer than Google.
Alex, we have a number of those "estimates wait time and tells you at the outset" deployed in the US. Credit card companies and insurers I deal with frequently have them. Some regular banks.
"But when was the last time you dialled into some organisation's call centre and the IVR told you how long you could expect to wait, so you could make a sensible decision whether to hold on the line or jack it in and do something less pointless?"
It's pretty common over here, but if you only do one thing, number of callers ahead of you is better, I think, the estimates can be misleading.
Or don't you have that either?
I've heard both in use at various companies I've dealt with, but Alex is right that it's not as widespread as it should be.
And 33.1 is right [I used to work in call centres, and, for a year or so, was a manager in one] re: the LED screens, slave-driving, and so on.
Really, Fonolo's technology is amazingly awesome (a web search engine for IVRs, with click-to-call deep dialing, plus click-to-schedule and call-back-on-answer, and they have plans for wiki-like annotation on the IVR map).
In general, call centres are like the car industry would be if GM had won the 1980s. No unions! Only one kind of car! Ever faster throughput! Who cares about the fuck-up rate! It's a testament to the pleasure people get from exercising petty managerial tyranny, even at the expense of actual profit, that nobody has introduced anything like the TPS or neocraftsmanship systems.
Also, I suspect that all speech to text systems will always be a bit crap. It's one of those problems where it's not so much a better algorithm or a faster processor you need as a better-defined question.
The California DMV will not only tell you how long you have to wait, but offer to let you leave your phone number and be called back. And here's the crazy thing—someone actually calls you back!
39: I used that too, it was excellent.
Maybe no one is reading this any more, but I have to vent. The worst experience I had with this was in Australia, when I had to do some half hour long automated phone card set up. It involved reciting any and all numbers associated with me, including the birth and death dates of all known ancestors, high school locker combination, and my name spelled backwards and forwards, etc. Anyways, I had to speak into the phone, but of course, since I don't have a goofy Aussie accent (after a point I did try to mimic one), it couldn't understand me. After three failures, it would transfer me to a real person (at an Indian call center, of course), to give the information. You would think I could give it all to the woman directly but, no, after telling her ONE piece of information, it would transfer me back to the automated system, so it could fail and then transfer me back. When I pointed out how utterly stupid and time-wasting this was for both of us, the woman acknowledged that but pointed out I had to get a failure for each piece of information on the automated system before I could talk to her.
A second recent harrowing phone experience was trying to buy a plane ticket over the phone in China. My name is long and onerous for English speakers, and it took me about an hour to spell out my full name for the very patient woman on the other end (who confirmed the spelling with a text message). Finally when I finished, the woman told me names couldn't exceed 24 characters, whereas mine was 27. She couldn't process the ticket, but I couldn't abbreviate my name since it had to match my passport. At that point, I hung up and decided to take the train instead.
Meet the (mutual!) mortgage lender that can't handle addresses with multiple occupancy. Seriously. Because they don't understand "Flat x, xx somewhere street, somewhereville, X99 9XX", they looked up "my name, xx somewhere st. somewhereville, X99 9XX" in the electoral roll, failed to find me, and denied me credit as a non-existent person.
What kind of credit do you get for not existing?
I've had the occasional (admittedly minor) trouble proving my identity due to my suffix being rendered funny, e.g. Iii, 111, lll, and 3.
What kind of credit do you get for not existing?
Exemption from the corporeal tax.
You know what they say about death and taxes, "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."
44. Hang on, are you saying that if you go by Stanley Q. Laurel III, the III is officially part of your name?
If it isn't part of your name, you are married to your mom.
47: It's on all my official documents: birth certificate, driver's license, passport, (maybe not my Subway Club card). Is that not commonplace in the UK?
If it isn't part of your name, you are married to your mom.
No, I'd take it as a sort of informal clarification. Stanley's name, in this hypothetical, would be Stanley Quetzalcoatl Laurel; his father's name would be Stanley Quetzalcoatl Laurel and so would his grandfather. On occasions where confusion might arise you additionally refer to them numerically because it's simpler than calling them "the drummer", "the flugelhorn player" and the "the bass saxophonist". Or so I'd supposed.
Even Elizabeth II doesn't have a number in her legal name, which is simply Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor.
Did her mom have the exact same name?
51. No, but people in Britain don't number their names, period. I can think of people whose names have gone down father to son for many generations, and I've never come across that usage here. At most you'd sometimes speak of "old John Smith" and "young John Smith". The only people who ever use numbers are reigning monarchs and very occasionally (and unofficially) dukes and earls, and it's not because they have the same name as their parents.
Is there a state-assigned number that Brits use for identification? Do scots use the same numbering? Northern Irish?
There's nothing state assigned about British names at all. In common law your legal name is that by which you're generally known. In practice, most people use the one on their birth/marriage/naturalisation certificate because it's handy to have a piece of paper. The only number on such certificates is the date.
You get assigned a National Insurance number, equivalent to the US Social Security number, at or around birth or immigration. It isn't formally an identification number, but there are some databases which use it as as a unique key. The difficulty with this is that almost nobody can ever remember their NI number (9 characters), so unless you happen to have a wage slip or something on you when they ask they have to search on your name anyway.
Speaking of identity-proving-ish things, I just filled out a rental application this week, and I was surprised to learn that the prospective landlord was planning to (and did) phone my place of employment to confirm not only that I work there but also my salary. I'd never encountered that before. (On the other hand, I'm pretty sure she didn't pull a credit report, which has been the standard practice for rental applications I've submitted in the past.)
So how to distinguish for databases between family members with the same name living at the same address? Police forces in the US use name + DOB, I think.
How large is the paperless population of Britain? Can you get a bank account with a foreign passport but no work visa, for instance?
I've wondered about the suffix "Sr.", which you always see as an option (alongside "Jr." and "III")on fill-in-the-blank name forms that include a "suffix" box. How exactly people usually go about officially getting the suffix "Sr."? When they have a kid and decide to name the kid after themselves, do they file paperwork to also change their own name?
Hilariously, the lender has my NI number, DoB, bank account numbers...but specifically they want me to be on the register of electors, and the format of my address means that they can't LEFT JOIN applicants and electors with 'address' as a foreign key because of their horror of a brain-damaged implementation.
Come to think of it, I had to deny ever having been refused credit on the application, which implies their SQL type error is going to go on my fucking credit report.
Actually, I think (and this is offhand, not professional) the law in the US is the same as the UK in terms of your legal name being the name you're generally known as. In principle, if you want your name to be Starchild, you can spin around three times, clap your hands, and say "I dub myself Starchild!", and so long as you inform everyone who needs to know in a way that satisfies them, and don't use the name change for fraud, that's really your new name even without court assistance. The legal name-change proceeding is about greasing the wheels to make it easy to tell people, rather than being generally required.
The sticking point is "inform everyone who needs to know in a way that satisfies them". And the DMV and the Social Security Administration and so on aren't generally satisfied without legal paperwork. But if you could do without a drivers license and so forth, which you're not legally required to have, you could change your name without paperwork.
(Actually, I kind of did this -- didn't change my name on the marriage license, and then hyphenated later. I got a drivers license and social security card in my right name by showing up with the marriage license demonstrating that I was married to a man named Buck, and looking plaintive until they gave me ID in the name Buck-Breath. But the fact that a couple of agencies stretched a point for me doesn't make the legality of my current name questionable -- they just had to be satisfied in order to change their records. My name really is Buck-Breath, rather than Breath, despite the fact that my change process was informal.)
58. 1 That's the same, I think.
58.2 I don't know, but these days I doubt it. All those kinds of regulations were tightened up in the first years of this century. I have no idea what would happen if you walked into a bank and said, "Hi, I'm a passing American tourist, but I just happen to have this large Sterling cheque which I'd like to deposit with you." When my MiL died ISTR we opened accounts for one of my American in-laws fairly easily to facilitate them holding funds in this country, but everything was easier in those innocent days.
this large Sterling cheque
No self-respecting American spells it "cheque". Sheesh.
64. Yes but you're trying to get a British banker to do you a favour by overlooking your lack of documents...
So how do the banks, the immigration authorities, and the billing departments of hospitals distinguish between people with the same name and same address?
For several decades, the death rate in the 13th arrondissment of Paris was unusually low because the identities of Chinese there legally would be sold on to new holders when the original name-bearer died and was quietly and privately buried.
Individuals have the freedom to get nicknames or whatever tattooed onto their necks, but control over identity can't just belong to individuals. After all, a crowd of pseudonyms couldn't even manage a sustained conversation, much less any more demanding social interaction.
62 is my understanding as well, although the fact that it's the "technical" rule is really more of an anachronism from the less record-heavy days of yore, when "you are what you're known as" was really the only practical rule. For most important purposes, it's really not the rule anymore. By which I mean: if I started calling myself Starchild tomorrow, I could successfully change my name for all purposes under the common law, but there aren't very many purposes anymore for which your common law name is all that important.
So how do the banks, the immigration authorities, and the billing departments of hospitals distinguish between people with the same name and same address?
Driving license, passport, company access pass, whatever... If you're in the country without either a birth/adoption/naturalisation certificate or a passport, you probably don't want to trouble the powers that be too much anyway.
Hospitals only have billing departments for private patients. They will access their insurance details before they admit them. Most people don't get billed by hospitals (yet).
62, 67: Yeah, I am in the process of changing an infant's name legally to the only name he's ever been called.* I was wacked out on pain killers and -- insane and long story omitted -- by myself. Being told by the registrar that I had to name him before leaving the hospital, I believed it and gave the poor kiddo a placeholder name. Turns out I could have left the name field blank and then taken a year to let the state know what I'd chosen. Instead I have to get some docs notarized and give a reason for the change and affirm that Little O isn't trying to escape the debts he's accumulated in bankruptcy or hide from John Law. And pay $$$. Luckily NYC has its own program that only charges $65. Doing it via the NYS supreme court costs $250. After the name change is approved by the courts, I have to run one of those cheezy ads in the back of the Voice.
*Well, he was called "Fucko" in utero and for the first week of his life.
I found out that my parents hyphenated my name when I was 16 and going for my driver's license. It was sitcom-esque - I handed over my license, and the woman asked me to spell my name, and I did, and she said "You left out the hyphen" and I said wearily "It's all one word, there's no hyphen" and she said "Yes there is" etc.
It turns out originally there had been one, and then my parents dropped it when the hyphen caused everyone to shorten my name. They want both names run together, goddammit.
69: Tell the story sometime? Sounds interesting.
67: Oh, certainly, to get by in the modern world you need paperwork. Situations like mine are a remaining vestige of the common-law rule, though -- when the DMV took inadequate paperwork and gave me a license anyway, they weren't erroneously disregarding my real legal name in any sense, they were just being lax with their own procedures.
My father and his father have/had the same name. The idea that either of them would then have a number appended would have caused hilarity. Chris is right that no-one here ever uses a numeral after their name, or even 'jr' for that matter.
Many years ago somebody I knew went through the breakup from hell, at the end of which her ex refused to reimburse any of money she had put into the house they'd bought together (she had put up the deposit and paid half the mortgage for several years). It ended in court. At one point during this proceeding the ex changed his name in common law to - well it might as well have been Starchild, only it was sillier - in order to argue that all the documents in the case were naming him wrongly.
Eventually the court ruled that he was really called Stupid Hippyname, but that the documents which called him by his previous name were just dandy. It delayed the outcome of the case by a few months and didn't help him at all when it came to allocating costs, but it was all allowed to be legal.
Come to think of it, my father-in-law and brother-in-law have the same name. Not sure how they handle it in Czechistan, but I don't ever recall seeing anything other than just plain 'Ladislav X' for both of them.
Ladislav X: not the most successful member of the Nation of Islam.
The idea that either of them would then have a number appended would have caused hilarity.
I don't write my name with the suffix except on official stuff. And even there it seems incredibly toolish.
Huh. I hadn't realized that the use of "Jr." and numerals after names was a specifically American thing. It's quite common here.
re: 77
I think to British eyes it's almost parodically American. To the extent that pompous American characters in films or sitcoms are always called something like Chester A. Baumgartner, the IIIrd.
77. You've probably noticed that most American characters in P.G.Wodehouse have numerals after their names. This is intended to raise a cheap laugh at the stereotype among the Brit readership.
With the Wodehouse you had a nicer example.
Birth number in CZ for banking, health, and security records:
http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodn%C3%A9_%C4%8D%C3%ADslo
A long time ago on Lovelines, Adam Corolla used to say that Dr. Drew had attended The Little Lord Fauntleroy School For Albino Hemophiliacs, which always cracked me up.
I know plenty of "Juniors," but I don't think I have actually met anybody who was a "III" and known it at the time I met them.
In my own family, the tradition is to use the grandfather's name for the first grandson of the same last name, so that might cut down on the problem.
Come to think of it, my father-in-law and brother-in-law have the same name. Not sure how they handle it in Czechistan
In the Highlands, where there is a shortage of surnames, they use cognomens. So if you're Ian MacNeil, and so are your father, your maternal uncle, one of your grandfathers and a cousin or two, you might be Ian Beag (little Ian) to distinguish you from Ian Mor (big Ian), Ian Dubh (black Ian), Ian Ruadh (red Ian), Ian Ban (fair Ian) and so on.
Or, on at least one island, they don't use surnames at all; you go by the name of your farm. So you're, say, Matt Morrison, but you'll be known as Matt Howar, and people will call your family the Howars, because your farm is called Howar, and what your actual surname is doesn't really matter (and people might not even know it). Which is bad luck if your farm is called Twatt.
(Yes, one of them is.)
I went to high school with a IV - a relative of an NY Congressman with a complicated family and a number of descendants with his exact name. I think there were at least two John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith the Fourths, cousins, or uncle and nephew, or something.
I think there were at least two John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith the Fourths
Clearly they needed to be 4.1 and 4.2.
billing departments of hospitals
Hospitals that send bills? Seriously, for any social security or tax purpose the NI No is used as an identifier. (There are an estimated several million fraudulent ones in circulation.) The NHS has been sharper recently about collecting on random foreigners who have major surgery on the taxpayer, but it's still pretty laid-back.
Typically, if you need to demonstrate identity in order to claim some document or other, you are advised to bring along two phone or other utility bills. You will note that the point of this procedure is not actually to prove your *name*, but rather to prove that you reside at an address where you can be held responsible if you fail to pay your debts, masquerade as someone else, hire out your driving licence to six different illegal immigrants in a day, etc.
Regarding 75, I'm delighted to say that I need no numbers after my X, having a pretty unusual slave name. Oh yes? Well, English surnames were in fact invented by a foreign invader as a database primary key to keep track of us so they could make us pay taxes and perform feudal duties like fighting the French and the Scots. (They hadn't yet realised we wouldn't actually need conscription until 1916, and perhaps we wouldn't have if we'd been fighting the French.)
Yeah, I just checked, and my guy's uncle changed his name from John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith Ramirez to J.J.J. Smith IV, so that he could pursue his own political career.
89: That's where the courts might play a role, no? I mean, if I changed my name to the name of my Congressional Rep and then ran against him, I'd probably have trouble.
I know two families where the kid is Something Something III and goes by the nickname "Tres" pronounced "Trace." Aggggh!
Oh, yeah, fraud is fraud. This wasn't fraud, just sort of wrapping himself in the mantle of his grandfather.
You'd think so; the Political Parties, Elections, and Referendums Act was passed in part to deal with a bloke in Wales who insisted on standing for election as the candidate of the Literal Democrats.
He got 10,000 votes...
91: I thought the classic was "Trey". Or, if you're making fun of the guy, "Three-sticks".
Although, in the light of future events, perhaps the Literal Democrat had a point.
My father is a III, but I am thankfully not a IV.
91, 94: "Trip" is the classic nickname.
I know two families where the kid is Something Something III and goes by the nickname "Tres" pronounced "Trace."
Much better to pronounce it as written and introduce yourself as "Something Something EEEEEEEE!"
I knew a guy at Cornell who was a IV. He was from a very WASPy, old-money background. I also went to elementary school with a Tres, who I guess must have been a III although I never thought about it until now.
My cousin would be a VI, I think, but we don't really do that here, as ttaM and others have mentioned.
Every time I see Random American IV I read it as Intravenous.
John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith
For the ethnic vote, he could have gone to Jan Jakob Jingleheimer Schmidt.*
*My dad actually learned the song this way, with the Js pronounced as Y sounds.
My cousin would be a VI
Some people (like my high school friend) keep the same numbers even when the oldest person with the same name is dead, but I think it is, or at least used to be, more conventional to number from the oldest living name-holder. So when Great-Grandpa John Sr. dies, John Jr. becomes John Sr., Trip becomes John Jr., and his son John IV becomes John III. If your cousin's great-great-great grandfather isn't alive, he's probably not a VI by those rules.
I may be living in the past, though -- I think I'm describing common practice in the first half of the twentieth century more than now.
I am, in fact, James Robert Helpy-Chalk IV. My father goes by Jim Helpy-Chalk, his father went by Bob Helpy-Chalk, and the original of the product line went by Jim.
I originally lobbied to name our firstborn daughter James Robert Helpy-Chalk V, on the grounds that she could go by Jamie. That was nixed, and I didn't really want to pass the name on to a boy, so the whole tradition has gone down.
104. That sounds amazingly confusing if the numbers are used in official contexts.
106: The numbers aren't used in official contexts, really. At least, in datasets of names you see lots of juniors and IIIs, but I can't recall seeing "IV" in any of them.
110: I've still never seen a single "IV" in any of the many datasets I've used. To be fair, I haven't been looking. Maybe it is solidifying as computers get pickier, but everyone I've known who was "junior" dropped the "junior" when their dad died.
The suffix is useful in databases! My dad has had trouble getting security clearance because of things I've done. This wouldn't happen if the IIIs and IVs were in the databases.
My first cousin Tom is a IV. He's known as T4. Neither he nor my first cousin Dave (maternal side -- he's a III) have kids, so we don't get to see how far it goes.
A more distant cousin of mine is said to be VII or VIII; I through III lived in Scotland, IV emigrated to Texas in the 1880s, and V to Ohio in the late 20s. I don't think anyone used the numbers before recently, but it's become something of a convention when talking about stuff. The one who's my contemporary doesn't have kids, so we're about done. I don't know him, but I bet he doesn't use a number.
A former colleague of mine back east is a III, and his son is nicknamed Ivy.
everyone I've known who was "junior" dropped the "junior" when their dad died.
Douglas Fairbanks and Martin Luther King?
My first cousin Tom is a IV. He's known as T4
An unfortunate nickname. T4 means triage category four - the lowest priority for evacuation.
T1 is critical/urgent; T2 is serious; T3 is walking wounded. T4 is dead. So, you know, no rush.
rob and I know a V. He goes by a nickname derived from his middle name.
a man named Buck, and looking plaintive until they gave me ID in the name Buck-Breath
I like that Buck has the same first and last name. Say hi to Buck Buck for me.
Sergeant Simon: Okay how many Marios are there between the two of you?
Lizardbreath: Three: Mario Mario and Lizardbreath Mario.
O.K. MLK goes against my theory, but Douglas Fairbanks would be a different issue as both the father and the son were known. Another example would be Hank Williams and Hank Williams Junior. But hardly anybody says "Bill Gates the Third."
Another example would be Hank Williams and Hank Williams Junior.
Also, MLK, Sr., outlived MLK, Jr., so it doesn't really go against my theory.
MLK goes against my theory
It's a junior thing. You wouldn't understand.
From the wiki page for MKL, Sr., I learn that there is a category called "Deaths from myocardial infarction". It turns out that of 3,447 people have died from MI, which suggests that the list isn't exhaustive or all of those bypass surgeries aren't needed.
125: There was a Math Kernel Library, Sr.?
114: Martin Luther King Sr. outlived Jr. . . . As wilth Bill Gates Sr., circumstances required Martin Luther King Sr. to be known as Sr. for much of his adult life, including after Jr.'s death, and he remains Sr. after his own death.
Far future historians will endlessly debate whether Martin Luther was coronated King himself, if so on what continent, and if he wasn't, why those monuments and faded texts always refer to his apparent successor as Martin Luther King II.
This, from the wikipedia entry on the film Junior, is funny:
In 2007 the Scottish artist Sandy Smith launched an essay-writing competition, asking entrants to attempt to prove that Junior could be considered the greatest movie of all time. Despite being covered in the national press the competition received fewer entries than there were prizes offered. The essays submitted, and one commissioned from an academic essay-writing company to Smith's own specifications, are available to read on the competition website - www.juniorbestfilmever.com
One of the reasons my brother isn't named after my dad is that the Northern half of the family uses the rules in 104, but the Southern half was clearly aiming for V & victory.
62: And the DMV and the Social Security Administration and so on aren't generally satisfied without legal paperwork.
Good lord, are they ever not. Admittedly, since the DMV is operated at a state level, there's latitude in how strictly or laxly any given state chooses to enforce rules. The difference between New Hampshire and Maryland in this was striking, when I was dealing with transferring my mom's car title from her (in NH) to me (in MD) last year. It was the first time I've appreciated New Hampshire's "live free or die" motto: they were willing to agree that yes, I was my mother's daughter, yes, they could see that she had died and that I was executrix of her estate, and so, all cool.
Maryland by contrast would not allow me to simply transfer the title. I had to sell it to myself, for $0 if I liked. Okay, I said, if you insist I hereby sell it to myself for $0. Oh, they then said: we need a notarized bill of sale from you to yourself showing that you've sold it to yourself for $0. Notarized? Seriously? Yes.
This has nothing directly to do with names, however, and had I found five dollars this story would be about that.
If you have some kind of office and no record, you can get in on the notary public scam.
I forgot that you also need an ink pad.
58.2: Conversation has moved on, but no, a foreign national cannot get a bank account in the UK with just a passport. Or, for that matter, an immigration visa. You have to also show stable residence (your name needs to be on a lease, on utility bills, on a phone bill, that sort of thing). Woo, fun things I have been discovering!
Oops, I have given out misinformation. Turns out it depends on which bank you're at! HSBC will give me one without anything else, but that makes sense given the international flavor of the bank.
133. I think the visa thing must be a product of the War on Certain Categories of Terror, because I'm pretty sure my SiL, whose residence is only as stable as the geology of California permits, had no trouble opening a British bank account from that address. She did have to show up in person and wave a passport at them. That was in the 90s.
I opened a Natwest account with nothing but a US passport in 2003, but many, many things have changed in Britain re: immigration since then.
And, to add to the idea that it is probably the result of the War on Certain Categories of Terror (I love this), all of my American friends were able to easily get bank accounts in 2002.
But it could also be because I'm getting one at Nationwide, which is ... not quite a bank as I understand it? Or something? I think I have some cultural learning to do.
I recommend putting all your money in an Icelandic Bank. What could go wrong?
The requirements for foreigners getting a bank account in Germany definitely changed, though not immediately after 9/11, as I was still able to open an account with passport only in September 2001. When I tried to open an account in 2005, I didn't realize that the requirements had changed. I was going about the business of opening an account, chatting with the friendly bank employee, he asks for all my documents to photocopy, I hand them over... and he comes back less than a minute later, suddenly cold as ice. Rather than just informing me that I needed to have a residence permit, he accused me of trying to sneakily get a bank account without one. It was a bewildering experience.
He did seem to get tons of information about me when he put my info into his computer; maybe he could see the thing about how I lived a few blocks from Mo/ham/ed At/ta
Nationwide is technically a building society. That means in practice that it's a mutual (formally owned by its investors, not shareholders), but it does everything a bank does. If anybody lobbies you to demutualise (convert it into a conventional bank owned by billionaires), vote no.
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Oh, hey, I just got approved for that new lease. Farewell, perennially late-with-the-bills housemates!
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143? I suck at math, but I think I know that one.
You have to also show stable residence (your name needs to be on a lease, on utility bills, on a phone bill, that sort of thing).
When I wanted to open a bank account in France, the bank demanded a utility bill (specifically, one from EDF/GDF) to open an account. But neither EDF nor GDF will open a customer account unless you have a local bank account (payment is by direct debit). I don't recall how I resolved that dilemma, but I remember it being an enormous pain.
Germany has similar circles. Have to be enrolled as a student to get the student health insurance, which you need to get your residence permit, which you need to enroll at the university. You have to convince someone somewhere in that circle to fudge something.