In the world of computer science, the word “null” means “no value.” That’s not to be confused with zero which means zero, an actual numerical value. To put it another way, null is so valueless that it essentially tells the reader not to even pay attention to the space the word occupies. It’s a very literal “there’s nothing to see here” used in official documentation in both the private and public sectors all around the world.So imagine how much of a nightmare your life would be if your last name was Null. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because the Wall Street Journal recently published a story of the trials and tribulations of people named Null.One such unfortunate soul is Nontra Null, a clothing designer from Burbank, California, who married into the name. She was invited to a friend’s wedding in India back in 2014, so she applied for a visa. She ended up making her flight a day before the wedding because her visa application kept getting delayed thanks to her last name. Computer systems had no idea how to interpret “Null.”Over the years, Nontra devised clever ways around the whole null issue. Sometimes she uses her maiden name, other times she hyphenates her name so the name is still represented but paired with something else so the system doesn’t assume there’s an inexplicable information void.The WSJ spoke to another Null, this one a 75-year-old meteorologist so tormented by the endless loop of misunderstandings he would get when trying to book hotel reservations online that he had to start adding his first initial to his last name otherwise the reservation form would reset assuming his last name was an empty value, eventually locking him out.All the Nulls out there suffering similar fates have one man to thank—a British computer scientist. This computer scientist refers to his implementation and popularization of the word “null” in computer science as a “billion-dollar mistake” since the word often creates all sorts of annoying technical issues, especially in older systems that haven’t had null eliminated from their lexicon.There is an irony to this whole story that the Wall Street Journal is maybe a little too bashful or conservative to acknowledge. I cannot ignore the fact that the man who inadvertently made life difficult for people with an unusual last name with a double meaning has likely been dealing with his own, let’s say, unique set of last name problems. His name is Tony Hoare—and yes, according to several YouTube videos I watched about him, along with a handful of text-to-speech generators I ran his name through, his last name is pronounced “whore.”The post Having ‘Null’ for a Last Name Kind of Sucks appeared first on VICE.