© Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ; iStock
Nontra Yantaprasert couldn't wait to take her husband's shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn't know what kinds of problems it would cause.
His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean "no value" or "invalid value." The Nulls of the world, it turns out, endure a lifetime of website bouncebacks, processing errors and declarations by customer-service representatives that their accounts don't exist.
After becoming a Null, she was due to travel to India in 2014 on a nonrefundable flight for a friend's marriage, but her visa hadn't arrived in the mail. The Indian consulate told her it had tried multiple times but the computer system couldn't process her last name, she said. A week before the wedding, she was still waiting.
© Nontra NullNontra Null has come up with some workarounds.
Null was first programmed 60 years ago by a British computer scientist named Tony Hoare. It has since been incorporated into many of the systems that make American commerce run, from hotel reservation sites to government agency forms. Some progress has been made toward addressing the long-running glitch, but Nulls still face challenges. Just last year, officials learned that the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid couldn't process applications for people with the last name Null. The issue was fixed in October.
In some computer systems, blocking the word is a security feature, says Vahid Behzadan, a computer science professor at the University of New Haven. In these cases, the system perceives the word as a potential attack or attempt at sabotage and will block its entry, he said. For the user, this could look like an error warning or not being able to progress past the first step of a form.
Hoare probably wasn't thinking about people with the 4,910th most common surname. He later called it his billion-dollar mistake, given the amount of programmer time it has used up and the damage it has inflicted on the user experience.
"It's a difficult problem to solve because it's so widespread," said Daan Leijen, a researcher at Microsoft, who says the company avoids use of null values in its software.
These days, Nontra Null sometimes uses her maiden name instead of her last name. Other times she puts a hyphen between the two. But she still gets packages and letters delivered to her at work for people who aren't in the company system. The names are automatically assigned as "null" — which is associated with Nontra in the system so the mail gets sent to her desk.
Jan Null, a 75-year-old meteorologist in Half Moon Bay, Calif., now adds his first initial to his last name when making online hotel reservations. Sometimes that's the only way to trick the system into reading "null" as a series of individual letters instead of a code.
Years ago, he struggled to reserve a room. He would type his first name, last name and email, then get bounced back to the first step like he hadn't entered anything at all. When he called for help, hotel workers were stumped, he said.
"Let's try making your last name something different," Jan remembers them suggesting.
Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word "NULL" on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.
In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn't been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word "null" with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.
Tartaro spoke about his experience at an annual hacker convention and Wired wrote a story about it. After the article came out, the private citation company that had sent him over $12,000 worth of fines left him alone, he said. But Tartaro said he is still getting dinged for incidents he wasn't involved in.
In December, his car insurance company called him saying he had been part of two separate car accidents in two different cities within 48 hours. A few days later, an insurance adjuster called him asking to inspect his car for damages.
"It hasn't left my driveway in a month," Tartaro told them. They eventually stopped calling him. "My wife gets super pissed off about it and she hates that I still have the license plate."
Computer software systems have evolved to avoid "null," said Leijen from Microsoft, who contributed research to one of these systems. But companies are sometimes hesitant to adopt new systems and give up the convenience of their old ones, he said.
© Morgan NullMorgan Null, in black, with her parents and brother, all Nulls
Representatives for the internet provider she had used in her old apartment initially told her they couldn't cancel her account because there was no last name associated with it.
She had been paying the company for months. She has since switched internet providers.
Reader Comments
Although in "journalist" circles including the WSJ, she doesn't stand out in any way ...