RE: User Names + Joe Bloggs
... Every name belongs to someone, somewhere, living or dead--even John Doe! The seed data in our tutorial database (maintenace management for manufacturing type companies) uses sports figures
and so far, oddly enough, not one professional basketball player or golfer has noticed or cared.
Which led me to reminisce about a database manual I post-translated
from Japlish to English almost 20 years ago.
All the examples in this 500+ page manual featured the same
league of (male) baseball players. The team names all tended
toward anthropomorphic, but ranged from sissy ("The
Fluttering Butterflies") to macho ("The Roaring Tigers").
Worse were the vital statistics of the players! These guys ranged
in height from about 5'4" to maybe 5'8". (The heights were
originally in meters and the weights in kilos, of course. I
chose to convert these to the English system.)
Since every change had to be approved by headquarters in Tokyo, it
added days and days to completion of the manual. Luckily, I was
paid by the hour.
At about that same time, btw, my husband was berated by his boss
for using the name of our recently deceased cat in screen shots in
a software product review for a major microcomputer software
magazine.
No advice, except that names, measurements, places and other statistics will inevitably have to change to meet global needs.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane.
--Emily
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