Prove you're who you say you are!

[rosa_heartlily]

So, I did the ITIL training on Monday and Tuesday and that went OK.  Did some test exams and they were OK.  Booked onto do the real exam and...  It's online, so they're super careful about ID.  I get that.  They want to make sure the person doing the exam is the person they say they are.  They provide a list of 'suitable' ID types, including birth certificate, but also say the ID must include a photo and match the name on the exam application.  Now, no birth certificate includes a photo, right?  And, of course, I'm now married, so I have a different name.  I wrote to them asking if my birth certificate plus marriage certificate would do.  No, they needed something with my photo.  I sent a picture of my work badge and...  I didn't quite understand the reply but I think what it boiled down to was - use your passport.

Which means renewing my passport.  Which is at most a nuisance.  And is probably a good idea because I ran into similar issues with my DBS.  But why list documents if you won't accept them?!

I've discovered that there is such a thing as a UK ID card but I don't think it's government issued (although it claims to be RECOGNISED by the Home Office), which is cheaper - but has to be renewed every 3 years rather than every 10.  And...  Well, it's probably just a lot easier to renew my passport.  So, that is now a Thing To Do.

Otherwise, I had a good two days off.  The sun was out but it's still a bit chilly.

I recently reread 'The Tao of Pooh and Te of Piglet', which I think I last read 10+ years ago :O  It felt a bit dated (the 'Tao of Pooh' is 40 years old and has worn better than 'The Te of Piglet', which is 30 years old and felt VERY 90s), but it reminded me how much I love the Pooh books.  So, I'm now rereading those - I'm about half way through 'The House at Pooh Corner'.  When I read them to the kids, I used different voices for all the characters and they loved them.  The only voice I couldn't really settle was for Tigger.

I had a vague memory of hearing that the 'real' Christopher Robin wasn't very keen on the books, so I looked it up.  He suffered years of bullying at school because of them.  And it wasn't even 'really' him in the stories - more his father's imagined son who had the same name.  He made peace with it all by writing his autobiography - but the reality was quite a looong way from the stories.  It might have been better if Milne had waited to publish them until his son was grown up.

It adds a certain poignancy to the stories, but I shall continue to read and enjoy them.

Anyway, it's Saturday, so I have Stuff To Do. See you next week, DW!

Comments

[lassarina]

If you know where to look, it's all over tech - like surname fields that insist surnames are Always within certain lengths (usually 3 to 30 characters), which tells my friend with a Romanized Chinese surname that her name isn't "real", and equally excluded many traditional Spanish surnames of the construction NameA y NameB. (Not to mention database construction that doesn't allow "special characters" like ñ or é, which can meaningfully change a name or word!)

It's even down to the way IDs are stored in, say, Microsoft Active Directory - you know, the security structure that underpins *most* tech in the world - instead of an immutable number and a matched, mutable text string, it's an immutable text string, and you can't change it without collossally fucking everything up, which absolutely sucks for anyone who has to change their name because most places use your name as your login. So for example, let's take a person named Anne Williams, whose login is awilliams under MS. What *should* be done is Anne gets assigned a unique ID number (let's say, 44350) but humans are bad at remembering those, so we tell the system "and the login awilliams means 44350." Computers are smart enough to handle this. Then if Anne marries/divorces and her surname becomes Reese, you change the string to areese and the system knows that's still 44350, no problem.

What actually happens - again, in the thing used by most of the world - is you set up Anne as awilliams and then when she changes her name, you have the choice of breaking and recreating literally all of her security and logins and losing all her history, or making her continue to use the incorrect surname, because "the system doesn't handle it well." because nobody thought it would need to.

It's "little" stuff, but it's also a big honking red flag that you don't belong here blaring on repeat, every single time.

(I did not change my name when I got married because I took one look at the paperwork and decided "Fuck it." Of the people I went to college with, only three have changed their names upon marriage; some had professional credentials established under their birth names that would have been difficult to convert, but most of us just went "well that's fucking annoying." And yet, even this choice had problems, like me spending five whole minutes - in the year of our lord 2017 - arguing with the bureaucrat at the passport office that yes, in fact, I have a different surname from my husband and no, I don't use his, yes, I'm certain, I only use my birth name.)

So many assumptions reminding me I'm not a real person in my own right--and I have it easy, because I have an (unusually spelled) coded-White name that people won't look at and go "lol that's not a real name."