What's your proper legal name?
My understanding (from having once prepared and filed a deed poll for a client) is that one's legal name is whatever one decides it should be. The deed poll doesn't effect any change from one's original name; it's just a useful form of official evidence of that change.
But my credit card issuer has taken it upon itself to rename me, which drives me crazy. They insist on calling me by my first given name and middle initial, rather than the first initial and second given name by which I've been known all my life, supposedly "due to anti money laundering guidelines and fraud prevention measures".
There's no more elementary rudeness than deliberately calling someone by the wrong name. I complained to Sainsbury's Bank that they were miscalling me back in April, when a statement turned up in that wrong form rather than with my initials (which were how the account had been named since I opened it in 1996). It took months and months of complaining about the same problem, compounded by the bank's becoming ever harder to contact by any means (except snail mail, which I refuse to use) as its staffing issues got worse, to get anyone to answer at all. Then they focused on the communications issue, ignored the misnomer and have complacently told me - well after issuing their 'final decision' - that they won't call me by anything but what they consider to be my "proper legal name" ie bloody "Mary".
They must be assuming that there's some legal rule which defines one's "proper legal name" as invariably consisting of one's first given name, the initial(s) of any subsequent given name(s) and then one's family name - but I know of no such legal requirement. I'd surely have heard of one if anyone had tried to impose such a daft definition, not least because lawyers and other City types are particularly prone to using something other than their first given name, often preceded by an initial.
If Sainsbury's Bank won't either concede the point or cite the supposed rule that they're so pig-headedly promulgating in practice, I'll have to complain to the Financial Services Ombudsman about the bank's rudely insisting on calling me by the wrong name. What worse way could there be to waste the FSO's time than the bank's insisting that I go to such a silly-sounding extreme?
But my credit card issuer has taken it upon itself to rename me, which drives me crazy. They insist on calling me by my first given name and middle initial, rather than the first initial and second given name by which I've been known all my life, supposedly "due to anti money laundering guidelines and fraud prevention measures".
There's no more elementary rudeness than deliberately calling someone by the wrong name. I complained to Sainsbury's Bank that they were miscalling me back in April, when a statement turned up in that wrong form rather than with my initials (which were how the account had been named since I opened it in 1996). It took months and months of complaining about the same problem, compounded by the bank's becoming ever harder to contact by any means (except snail mail, which I refuse to use) as its staffing issues got worse, to get anyone to answer at all. Then they focused on the communications issue, ignored the misnomer and have complacently told me - well after issuing their 'final decision' - that they won't call me by anything but what they consider to be my "proper legal name" ie bloody "Mary".
They must be assuming that there's some legal rule which defines one's "proper legal name" as invariably consisting of one's first given name, the initial(s) of any subsequent given name(s) and then one's family name - but I know of no such legal requirement. I'd surely have heard of one if anyone had tried to impose such a daft definition, not least because lawyers and other City types are particularly prone to using something other than their first given name, often preceded by an initial.
If Sainsbury's Bank won't either concede the point or cite the supposed rule that they're so pig-headedly promulgating in practice, I'll have to complain to the Financial Services Ombudsman about the bank's rudely insisting on calling me by the wrong name. What worse way could there be to waste the FSO's time than the bank's insisting that I go to such a silly-sounding extreme?
