"Sam Wilson" wrote in message
...
A colleague back in the day, who didn't have a middle name, filled in an
order form for business cards, and duly got back a few boxes of:

Fred N.A. Blogs

:-)

On of the UoEd’s schools used to use login names based on initials but
they
were at least 3 characters long. People without a middle name got an “x”
inserted, so S.... W.... (not me) was “sxw”. It looked odd when you
first
saw one - “oh, I didn’t know Steve’s middle name was Xavier...”

It's an interesting difference between UK and US: here in the UK middle
names and initials are rarely used - almost never in the printed name below
a handwritten signature or in the salutation ("Dear ...") on a letter. And
very rarely in official lists (examination results etc). And not on signs on
office doors. In the US, a middle initial seems to be mandatory.

The only time I've seen middle initials used at work is on circulation lists
for documents (in the days when the same copy of a document was passed from
person to person and then to the archive) when initials (all of them) are
used: each recipient crosses off their initials before sending to the next
person on the list. I worked in a department where three out of the eight
people used their middle name or a variant of their name, and it got
confusing:

MEL was "Betty Long"
BML was "Maureen Lee"

(people always got those two the wrong way round)