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I remember ordering a CD from the US by email before the days of internet
ordering and they insisted on a middle name which I don't have. They
seemed happy with Zed and I don't think they correlated it with Zee.

Interesting how conventions for middle names have changed over the years.
All four of my grandparents, born around 1910 +/- a few years, had just one
name. Their parents and their children had two forenames. I wonder why
middle names went out of fashion around 1910 - or were my grandparents an
unrepresentative sample? ;-)

There was a trend slightly further back for a family name (eg mother's
maiden surname) to be used as a first name. One of my great grandfather's
had the first name Herd, which was his mother's maiden surname. Come to
think of it, I'm not sure he had a middle name, either, so maybe the
no-middle-name trend started earlier. My dad's paternal grandmother's family
had a trend for using the surnames of famous politicians of the time as
middle names for their children - there is a forename Gladstone surname,
forename Palmerstone surname and forename Disraeli surname.