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The big picture: Having the last name “Null” is apparently the modern equivalent of being cursed. Just ask the Nulls who endure a never-ending loop of website errors, processing failures, and customer service reps telling them their accounts don’t actually exist. And it’s all thanks to a computer scientist who decided that, when it comes to programming, the word should be reserved for signifying an invalid or non-existent value.
One of the victims is Nontra Null, a 41-year-old clothing designer from Burbank. She was initially excited to take up her husband’s name since it was a lot easier to pronounce. What she didn’t realize was the pain it would cause her.
Nontra Null told the Wall Street Journal that in 2014, she nearly missed attending a friend’s wedding in India because the consulate’s systems kept getting tripped up trying to process her newly acquired surname when issuing her visa. She made it just before her flight after an agonizing delay.
These days, Nontra has learned some clever tricks to bypass the null issue, like using her former maiden name or inserting a hyphen into her current last name to prevent systems from misreading it as computer code.
Even basic tasks like booking hotel rooms online can turn into massive headaches for Nulls. Jan Null, a 75-year-old meteorologist, now includes his first initial when making reservations to stop sites from interpreting his name as an empty value and locking him out.
Those without the surname aren’t immune from null nuisances either. Joseph Tartaro told WSJ that he purposely got a “NULL” license plate in 2018 assuming it would be a harmless joke. Amusingly, after paying a single parking ticket in 2018, his mailbox was soon flooded with hundreds of erroneous traffic citations meant for other vehicles. His plate triggered a glitch in the systems and wrongly linked those fines to his vehicle.
After the debacle made headlines in 2018, the citation company finally left Tartaro alone. But just last December, his insurance company accused him of being in two separate accidents within 48 hours when their system wrongly matched his policy to the incidents.
For Morgan Null, a 26-year-old attorney in Pittsburgh, her family name created issues when she tried canceling her internet service after moving. The provider initially claimed they couldn’t because her account had no associated last name on file despite her paying them for months. She eventually had to switch ISPs.
The origin of this coding blunder traces back six decades to a British computer scientist who first gave null its special reserved status. He obviously didn’t take into account the 4,910th most common surname when he did so, and has regretted the move ever since, even calling it a “billion-dollar mistake.”
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