I'm sorry what's your family name?!

This is probably the most important lesson I learnt regarding the use of foreign names in the US: KISS! (Keep it simple, silly). That's right... silly of me when I enrolled for the 1st time in Berkeley and told them my family name was Santos Vieira... what a mistake... I should have known that in the US your most likely to have only two names (the 1st and the last!)... More than this creates chaos in the records!

From the moment I used Santos Vieira for the first time in a form in the US, all kinds of unthinkable problems have happened. Mistakes of input together with the inflexibility of some of the american databases has lead to a list of names that can only make us laugh. Up until now this is a list of possible names for me in the US:

Pedro Santos Vieira (1% of the time!)
Pedro Vieira (3 to 5% of the time)
Pedro Viera (90%?)
Pedro SantosVieira
Pedro Santos-Vieira
Pedro Santos-Viera
Pedro H. Viera
Pedro SantosVievera (this was probably a mutation caused during the MRI!)

This got to the point that when they ask me for my last name to look for me in their records, I answer: "which of them?! Can you look for a Pedro in there?!"

Don't forget: in the US you better KISS.

P.S.: as some of you know the last "S" in KISS usually stands for something stronger than "silly"...