What’s in a title?

I’m having to do some training for work. I’ve been dreading it a bit as I’m not quite clear why I’m having to do it and also the fact that it appears to be 3 consecutive days of 9 to 5 “online classroom”. This instantly fills me with dread. Being online 9 to 5 is too much! Even in my (relatively) new world of hybrid working, I don’t spend my whole time online. This seems to be training that used to be delivered in a classroom and has just been wheeched over to online delivery. I haven’t actually done the course yet so maybe I should reserve judgement. However, as my job is all about teaching and learning with technology…I will be judging how this training works!

The first thing has been to navigate all the online systems necessary to undertake the training. So far I’ve had to create accounts on 3 different third-party systems for this course. The likelihood that I’m going to be doing multiple password resets is high. (Actually it’s not, I use a password manager but you can see the point).

As part of setting up these accounts I obviously have to supply a variety of details and so I come to the title of this post. What is the obsession with stating a title? Not only that with having to state a title. Here’s an example from one of the systems…

This is a mandatory field, I have to choose and that’s the list of options. “Inspector”? Really? That’s an odd one. I’m tempted to choose it. What might happen? Will the presenter refer to me as “Inspector Ritchie” for the duration of the course? That might be fun. Will this appear on course communications, will it be printed on my course certificate? That might be less fun. Some indication of where the title would be used might be good but why is it mandatory in the first place? Are they running on some ancient backend system in which the title field is mandatory and they can’t change it?

I can imagine that there are people who care about a title and want it to be used…but why make it mandatory? And why the odd choices? Will Baron BigWig of Elsewhere be put out that their title has been excluded?

Does not knowing someone’s title cause a meltdown when you have to write “Dear <someone>”? Well, if I haven’t provided a title, just assume it’s ok to use my first name, honestly, I don’t mind.

In this case there’s nowhere for preferred pronouns. Is this mandatory title thing therefore a throwback? I use a shortened version of my first name, which can be ambiguous where pronouns are concerned so stating preferred pronouns can be useful.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ve spent way too much time obsessing about this. On with the course.