Nontra Yantaprasert couldn’t wait to take her husband’s shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn’t know what kinds of problems it would cause.

His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean “no value” or “invalid value.” The Nulls of the world, it turns out, endure a lifetime of website bouncebacks, processing errors and declarations by customer-service representatives that their accounts don’t exist.

After becoming a Null, she was due to travel to India in 2014 on a nonrefundable flight for a friend’s marriage, but her visa hadn’t arrived in the mail. The Indian consulate told her it had tried multiple times but the computer system couldn’t process her last name, she said. A week before the wedding, she was still waiting.

“I had to mentally come to terms with not being able to go,” said Nontra, a 41-year-old clothing designer in Burbank, Calif. She finally received the documents the day before her flight. Since then, she has come up with workarounds to ease the burden of being a Null.