Know Your Place, Underling

Calling her ‘madam’ isn’t polite? I’m confused.

She sounds nice.
Well, quite. As I understand it, Cambridge porters, who see hundreds of people a day, including students, staff, faculty and visitors, tend to address people as “sir” and “madam.” (Porters are not generally expected to remember the names and formal titles of every member of staff and faculty, numbering in the thousands, at Cambridge’s 30 or so colleges.) Contrary to Dr Gopal’s faintly hysterical tirade, this courtesy – being called madam – is not obvious and damning proof of “aggression,” let alone “racial profiling and unconscious bias.” A more obvious explanation is that Dr Gopal is a preening, delusional cow.
Note that people who disagree with Dr Gopal’s latest persecution fantasy, including the head of the campus visitor service, are dismissed by her as “presumably white.” So no racism there, obviously.

It’s simple. She’s trying to colonize Cambridge. The natives must learn their place.

As we’ve seen, academic lefties can get rather touchy about social status.

Has she checked her privilege lately?
I’m now imagining myself walking into the nearest department store and taking umbrage at being called “sir,” rather than “Mr Thompson” – as if every member of staff should somehow memorise the names of every single customer – and then accusing the bewildered sales assistant of obviously being homophobic.

The porters should all call her “sir” from now on, and when she gets mad about that, go to “Hey, you.” I would not dream of suggesting that they use “Bitch, please.”

In a monstrous hissy fit she has gone on strike. No postcolonial indoctrination of fools for the foreseeable future! Cambridge reels.

These days you can dress any personal peeve as a political cause and people lap it up.

“a preening, delusional cow”
What are the traditional iconic names for cows in the UK? Here in the States they are “Bossy” and “Elsie”. (I realize that in academia they are “Professor” and “Dean”.)

Competent, secure people don’t need to preface every human action by reciting from their C.V.
Well, yes. Absolutely.
And once again we see that there’s no pretext too trivial, too microscopic, that it won’t be exploited shamelessly by such people. If it’s not spellcheck software or innocuous gardening programmes, it’s the word “madam.”
It’s neurotic.

Don’t know how to include pics in comments and in general have trouble following Twatter troughs but I read one of her 140-character shits and am confused:
“[The] Head Porter who then launched into a tirade about how people treat him…He’d never talk like this to actual white men who behave badly.”
I must be missing something because it looks like she’s admitting to being a bitch and suffering consequences therefrom. Can someone unravel this nonsense?

“Dr. ‘Jane Doe,’ Ed.D.” Yeah, we get it. You have to tell the world twice in four words you believe you’re really, really smart and want us to believe it, too.
OTOH, it is useful so that no one could confuse her with a doctor who could cure your epizootis, or one a degree in a real subject, say, nuclear physics.

I must be missing something because it looks like she’s admitting to being a bitch and suffering consequences therefrom.
Same here.

I must be missing something because it looks like she’s admitting to being a bitch and suffering consequences therefrom.
Yes, I think that’s the meat of it. It’s a cliché, and true, that you can often tell a lot about someone by how they treat waiters, checkout assistants, etc. – anyone they imagine to be of lower social standing.

OTOH, it is useful so that no one could confuse her with a [real] doctor…
Any such confusion was dispelled within the first thirty seconds of conversation. My interactions with this person were professional and outside the area of her (nominal) expertise. Nonetheless, she seemed to believe that the letters fore and aft of her name granted her some sort of universal knowledge not seen since Gottfried Leibnitz. I cannot tell you how much perverse joy I experienced the many times I would listen to her expound for five or ten minutes on some legal question then turn to me for affirmation, only for me to reply, “Well, no, actually.”

David, the sizing of your html tutorial above seem a little . . . aggressive.
Er, that’s Mr Thompson, if you don’t mind.

What’s that you say, R. Sherman?

Competent, secure people don’t need to preface every human action by reciting from their C.V.
Indeed, or wearing them. Taken from real life…

Memorandum For: All personnel
Subject: Uniform Policy
1) Effective immediately all personnel will wear either all ribbons, or one row of three, on the Class B uniform or service equivalent.
2) Skill and/or warfare badges are at the wearers discretion.

A short while later…

Memorandum For: All personnel
Subject: Uniform Policy
1) It has come to the attention of the Senior Enlisted Advisor that certain personnel are not taking the new policy regarding ribbon wear seriously.
2) If a service member elects to wear only three, it will be the top three. The lowest three, or a random three, are unacceptable for wear.
3) There will be an All Hands Class B or service equivalent inspection at 1600 tomorrow.

David Thompson’s Blog: No one admitted with a proper honorific.
As a friend once said, if you can put more initials after your name than are in your name, you are overeducated.

I think we can make do with not having to go all the way down to “hey, you!”.
I recommend “Bub” and “Chickie”.

Talking of preening, delusional cows from Cambridge…
Dr Victoria Bateman

I’ve always thought that there is an inverse relationship between one’s personal emphasis on titles, degrees, etc. and one’s actual competence & security. Competent, secure people don’t need to preface every human action by reciting from their C.V.
There’s a Doctor of Chemistry I’ve read of, a fellow named Isaac Asimov, where as I recall, he’s stated that the one time that he’s actually cited his doctorate was in replying to a letter where doctorates were insistently getting waved about.
In turn, there is a friend of mine who has his own doctorate in crystallography or so, had a long career running a Uni lab and regularly consulting with other assorted related doctors, is one of the cofounders of a fairly large and quite thriving international organization, has piled up rather a few major titles and awards in that organization. At times, I have heard The Titles get pulled out, pretty much only in the particularly relevant circumstances, and only to make certain of Are you [name and title]?.
And quite for the most part, even down to his Uni email address, he introduces himself as, and everyone refers to him by, a nickname he got as a teenager when he took a spectacularly flying tumble over the bars of a bicycle.

I’m not entirely convinced that she isn’t unwell.
No. Not tripping my BPDar. Just a typical over-indulged emotional adolescent pulling the “I hate you Dad/Pay attention to meeeee” routine.

Just a typical over-indulged emotional adolescent pulling the “I hate you Dad/Pay attention to meeeee” routine.
Well, I think that counts as unwell. If a person is acting out their psychodramas using incongruous confrontational nudity – i.e., nudity intended to unnerve, embarrass or annoy, followed by disingenuous accusations of prudishness – then something went wrong somewhere. And we’ve seen much the same mindset before.
It wasn’t pretty then either, physically or psychologically.

Adjust your monitor.
I too seem to be immune to her attributes. Must be my piety and all that clean living.

Must be my piety and all that clean living.
I have neither of those, but if there was ever a case for avoiding crazy with ones johnson (or not even with your worst enemy’s), this is a textbook example.