I used to work for an Australian company that produced HR software - recruitment, 360 reviews, etc. Our job application form had a fairly standard list of titles (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Mr, Dr, and maybe one or two others) that nearly all clients were happy with. However, a university asked us to add maybe 60 more, much like the list in this screenshot. Some understandable for a university (things like “Prof” or a suffix of “Ph.D.”) and some… less understandable (Colonel, Lieutenant, General, Father, Capitan, Sir, The Honourable, …)
The customer is always right… We had to add a “huge list of titles” feature flag to the system, that was only enabled for this one client. All other clients were fine with the standard list.
Sounds like a university I know - brilliant and accomplished people, very proud of it, to the point of projecting that pride on everyone else and assume everyone must hold their full title as dear as they do. The idea of one of my teachers, some “First Name, Baron of Examplington-Doublename”, telling us to just call him “Mr. Examplington” would have shorted out their brains.
For all their laudable competencies, humility was not among them.
(Not in Australia, but I imagine it’s hardly exclusive.)
I used to work for an Australian company that produced HR software - recruitment, 360 reviews, etc. Our job application form had a fairly standard list of titles (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Mr, Dr, and maybe one or two others) that nearly all clients were happy with. However, a university asked us to add maybe 60 more, much like the list in this screenshot. Some understandable for a university (things like “Prof” or a suffix of “Ph.D.”) and some… less understandable (Colonel, Lieutenant, General, Father, Capitan, Sir, The Honourable, …)
The customer is always right… We had to add a “huge list of titles” feature flag to the system, that was only enabled for this one client. All other clients were fine with the standard list.
Sounds like a university I know - brilliant and accomplished people, very proud of it, to the point of projecting that pride on everyone else and assume everyone must hold their full title as dear as they do. The idea of one of my teachers, some “First Name, Baron of Examplington-Doublename”, telling us to just call him “Mr. Examplington” would have shorted out their brains.
For all their laudable competencies, humility was not among them.
(Not in Australia, but I imagine it’s hardly exclusive.)
What if His Excellency Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron enrolls at that uni?