- What’s in a name? A lot, if you’re a computer program.
Modern computers have immense processing power that allows them to crunch numbers faster than a human being could ever hope to. However, that doesn’t make computers smart.
Despite what the smart gadget and artificial intelligence gurus would have you believe, computers and computer programs are so particular that they border on being complete idiots. A single wrong word in the wrong place can grind their processes to a glitchy halt.
A single word like someone’s last name.
Everybody, meet all the people in the world whose last name is Null. They carry what may be one of the most unfortunate names possible in the current society.
That’s because, in computer terminology, the word “null” translates to “no value.” And computer programs want a number or other value everywhere, so what do they do when they run into an unexpected “null?”
Well, they crash. And that can make getting things done virtually impossible for any Null.
Let’s meet some of those people.
An Almost Missed Wedding
First off, we have Nontra Null from Burbank, California. While still dating her now-husband, the 41-year-old couldn’t wait to get hitched and take his simple four-letter last name.
After all, her maiden name is Yantraprasert. While a fine name in itself, you can probably see why she was tired of people mispronouncing and spelling the name.
In 2014, after she had become a Null, she was invited to attend a friend’s wedding in India. Excited, she applied for a visa and started packing her bags.
But she didn’t receive her visa by the reported deadline.
When she asked the Indian embassy about the status of her application, she got a bizarre answer. According to the embassy, they were unable to process her visa, because her last name crashed their system with every attempt.
“I had to mentally come to terms with not being able to go,” Mrs. Null told Wall Street Journal.
Fortunately, she finally received her visa — a day before her non-refundable flight. Someone at the embassy must have chucked their computer out the window and filled the paperwork by hand.
That’s not the only time Mrs. Null has struggled with her husband’s last name, and she has devised workarounds. Sometimes she fills in her name as Yantraprasert-Nul, which does kind of defeat her whole reason for changing her name.
No Room for Nulls
Next, we have Jan Null. The 75-year meteorologist from Half Moon Bay, California, must be sick and tired of filling online hotel reservations.
His first strange computer event happened years ago when he was attempting to reserve a hotel room online. He’d fill out his personal details on the reservation website and hit “submit,” only to get bounced back to an empty reservation form.
This happened again and again. Obviously, Mr. Null assumed the system was just broken, so he called the hotel to make his reservation.
Much to his surprise, the employee on the phone ran into the same issue. Null’s last name reset the reservation system with every attempt.
Finally, Null managed to make his reservation after the hotel agent suggested they misspell his name on purpose and add an explanatory note to the reservation. And so, Mr. Null got his hotel room reserved.
These days, he tends to add his first initial to the last name. Hotels probably assume he’s an old man who doesn’t quite understand how to fill online forms — when in reality, he’s tech savvy enough to fool their dumb systems into working correctly.
‘My Wife is Pissed’
You don’t always have to be named Null yourself to run into issues. Joseph Tartaro found that out after he got a vanity plate for his car a decade back.
His license plate reads NULL. Tartaro thought it’d be funny to have an “empty” license plate.
Jokingly, he figured that he might weasel his way out of tickets if a license value of “null” crashed the cops’ system.
Yet, the exact opposite happened. After paying of one small traffic violations in 2018, Tartaro receive hundreds of tickets in his name — for incidents that had happened to strangers in completely different cities.
The “null” that had been entered into the traffic control system caused it to go haywire and start assigning information from other tickets to fill what the computers thought was a lacking data entry.
Just recently, an insurance agent wanted to come inspect his vehicle after Tartaro was reported as having had two serious accidents within 48 hours. Tartaro told his insurance company the car hadn’t moved from his driveway in a month.
“My wife gets super pissed off about it and she hates that I still have the license plate,” Tartaro admitted.
A ‘Billion-dollar Mistake’
So why does this all happen? Well, we can put all blame on Tony Hoare, a Turing Award-winning British computer scientist.
He invented and developed “null” to give computers a way to represent an empty value, because sometimes it’s necessary. And, to be fair, Hoare could’ve never foreseen what issues his invention could cause for people named Null.
Yet, her regrets creating “null” and has called it a “billion-dollar mistake.” That’s not just because of the hassle it has caused to all the Nulls — it’s because the “null” can introduce serious vulnerabilities in computer systems that cybercriminals can abuse.
That, and it can fatally crash systems, as anyone named Null has found out.
Because of these issues, most modern programming language no longer use “null” and represent empty values in different and more secure ways. Considering how reluctant businesses and agencies are to update their systems, though, the troubles of Nulls everywhere are far from over.