BillH said:
Nor should it, really. I'm convinced that I got my Ph.D. by hanging around long enough to make my dissertation committee tired of me.
I have respect for anybody with higher education, for the most part. What I don't like is when somebody (present company excepted, Bill---I'm sure you don't do this
) uses that education to denegrate somebody else, such as the individual I discussed earlier.
This gal literally signs
everything with "Ph.D" after her name---even intra-office memos of five words or less. I suspect she may even have Ph.D-embossed potty paper in her private bathroom at home.
Which is fine, I guess; she should be rightly proud of her achievement, but to me, she's using the doctorate as a tool to elevate herself so she can look down her nose from her lofty educational height at the Lesser Beings She Is Forced To Endure.
And she doesn't really have anything to brag on. Before she was taken on as faculty at our college (before she was promoted to Veep), she was a high school typing teacher.
(shrug)
I have a little alphabet I could use behind my name, too, if I so desired; I could put down "BA, CE, SSGT, USAF", for Bachelor of Arts, Combat Engineer, Staff Sergeant, United States Air Force. And, I suppose, I could put down "FBTWHABSA", for Fraternal Brotherhood of Them What Has Actually Been Shot At, something which I'm sure she cannot boast.
It's all a game, actually. I had an instructor tell me my police officer's badge was "nothing but a toy"; to which I smiled and said, "I'll remind you of that the next time you call me to break up a fistfight in one of your classes. I'll shrug and say there's nothing I can do; my badge is only a toy." She stood there and blinked as what I said slowly sank in. Too often, we are seen as an annoyance, someone who's there to harrass people and make their lives miserable, and so we are resented, disliked, disrespected, even actively hated---until somebody gets into a fight, or somebody keels over onto the floor with a medical emergency, or somebody gets locked out in the snow, or somebody trips off on some drug or another, or they get into a traffic accident, or any numer of things---and then we're everybody's best buddy.
Another instructor told me he was a faculty member (like I didn't know), while I was simply "the hired help". Again I smiled, and said, "Two semesters ago, you were a student, which placed you
below 'the hired help'. But if you want to make comparisons, that's fine. I saw the sheepskin on your office wall. You have a Bachelor's degree and you are a certified radiologist. Guess what?
I have a Bachelor's degree, and I am a certified law enforcement specialist. The only difference between you and me is the field."
