In Which I Make my Life Easier by Deciding the Variance of Names is Not my Problem

My students came back a week early.  I am shocked.  Really.  Things never happen early, and now I am completely unprepared.  I did, however, manage to do some much needed maintenance on my lab, including deleting the varied mess that had become all the student accounts over the years and starting over with new ones that can be easily sorted (and cleaned out) by year of graduation.  This is when I realized that many Tanzanians never spell their names the same way twice.  Really.  L's and R's are interchangeable, ending vowels can be added or deleted at will, and consonants can be doubled for no obvious reason.  After a young man with the surname Pwele complained he was entered into the system as Pwere and a young man with the surname Addam complained he was in the system as Adamu, I decided on a rule.  I created the accounts based on a list I got from the registrar.  The name on that official list is the name that must be used.  If students believe their names are misspelled, it is their responsibility to get it changed on the official list.

I am the inflexible bureaucrat forcing previously flexible things into a format.  I feel somewhat like a tool, but as the system admin, I am not keeping track of the alternate spellings of 1000 different names.