Credit card protest

Today I began filling out a web application for a credit card through CitiCards with a good cash-back rewards program. 5% cash back on select purchases such as supermarkets, gas stations, and drug stores, 2% cash back on these same purchases thereafter, and 1% cash back on all other purchases.

This sounded like a good deal to me until I put my last name in the Last Name field (including the hyphen). Red letters bitched at me that "special characters such as & and ()" are not allowed.

This offends me on two levels. First as a feminist, because it's another example of just how few people comprehend the idea of a hyphenated name. People assume that I want to use only the last part of it, people have no idea how to alphabetize it (you use the first character of the first last name), and people from the bank to the voting booth have to cleverly comment on its length.

Second it offends me as someone who occasionally does some programming. I have to assume that the person who wrote the code for accepting input from this field was either too clueless to think that any non-letter character in a last name could be valid input, or too lazy to figure out how to store the hyphenated name in the database. Either way, I'm not impressed.

I did not complete this credit card application. It may be up to $300 lost in cash back rewards per year, but I have to protest somehow. I'll find some other company with cash back rewards to reap the benefits of my credit card transaction fees.