Adventures in Name Changing, Part 4: A Word on Miss Now Mrs

As you can probably tell, I'm not having the greatest experience in changing my name. My situation is unique enough that I shoulder some of the blame (or rather, my parents, who chose to name me something complicated and then refer to me by my middle name. At least that's better than other Filipinos who have names completely unrelated to their legal names, for example, Boy, Baby, there's one in every family. It's a Filipino thing. But I digress).

Some people have asked me why I didn't just use the Miss now Mrs. service. For thirty dollars, they will give you a very handy admin screen where you fill out your information once and they copy it to all the necessary forms and letters. You print it out, it gives you instructions, you do them. It's simple, and I'll admit that I was tempted to use it.

But here's the thing. For many of these, you still have to show up. You still have to go to social security. You still have to go to the DMV. When I did my banks they made me sign all this shit and there's no way I could have done that over the mail.

They claim:

We save each customer an average of 13 hours of form research, completion and filing mishaps!

I'm not sure I believe this. Like I said above there are things you just have to go to, you can't just mail it in. This service would not have spared me the 3 hours total it took to go to the DMV (three times) and wait in line, take the photo, and pay. In many ways showing up to the actual office will save you time, they know exactly what forms you need and you just go and fill it out. But then again, I'm fortunate that my job has half day Fridays during the summer when I can go and do this. I'm not sure how I'd feel if I had a different job.

So my take on this service is that if you don't mind spending the thirty dollars, it's convenient, and it makes a good thoughtful gift to a newlywed. Provided you KNOW she's changing her last name. If I made the decision to keep my name and gotten this as a gift I would not have been happy.