While I think the OP is a little misguided, and most of us do accept that it’s a US board, I am amused that one or two of the cries against parochialism are, by their very existence, indicative of parochialism:
Er… no. Having a database that will only accept domestic numbers is, I’m afraid, US-centric. Don’t you get it?
It’s not just the US, though. When I moved back to the UK, I couldn’t get a cellphone, or various utilities connected, because I couldn’t provide a UK postcode for my last five years’ addresses. Bad database design more than anything, but yes, very [insert country here]-centric.
No, but what happens if, say, you slip on a banana peel in the stairwell? Or Coworker Carl finally snaps and brings his favorite gun to work? That’s why they’re emergency contacts.
While you’re being carted off to the hospital for that lump on your head or the the police station to explain why you carpoolmate kept screaming “NAVA!!!”, your employer will need to call someone… not Carl though. He looks a little dodgy.
If we’re talking about the University not accepting foreign contact numbers, then that’s entirely different. It’s not unheard of at all for someone to travel alone overseas to study and anyone with half a brain at a Grad School would have taken that into account.
Let’s be reasonable here. The large majority of posters on SDMB are in the US and it’s based in the US, so you’ll just have to accept that the default location assuption is “US.” That’s much different than ignoring non-US questions (or worse), and not, IMHO, a good reason to get your panties in a bunch.
However, even within the US there are many differences between the states (and DC, etc.), both in culture and law. Stated or not, “US” is hardly sufficient location information. The solution to both problems is accurate location information in that little “location” field. If you insist on having a joke in that field (or nothing at all) you’re stupid if you don’t locate yourself in a thread where that information is required.
But wasn’t there a pile-up on a poster a while back (I think it was Nava, who got into trouble for always mentioning s/he was from Spain? There were a whole bunch of comments about how people were being freakin’ driven nuts by it, and that scared me. As a non-US poster myself, I try to make it clear where I’m coming from and where my cultural biases are but damn, that pile-up was far-out.
So damned if you assume people know where you’re from and don’t mention it, which leads to misunderstandings, and damned if you don’t, in which case people are frightfully annoyed at you.
I don’t think that was the reason for the “pile-up” (such quaint expressions you foreign people use!).*
*I plan to do my part for board internationalization by henceforth using the French term for pile on: mettre le paquet.
Example of usage: “Ooh la la! C’est Liberal fait du dramatiser! Je veux mettre le paquet!!!”
It seems that I was talking about employers, while everyone else was talking about grad schools. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable for your employer [1] to assume you know someone nearby. It is unreasonable for a grad school to not grok that their foreign students would only have foreign contacts.
[1] - “Employer” here assumes a small to mid-sized business, not a multi-national corporation.
Gee, that’s a tough one. It’s not like you have an academic adviser who might be sympathetic enough to stand in until you get yourself well established or anything. Frankly, I think it would be a good idea to establish such a contact ASAP, even if it’s not required on some form.
Sure, and my adviser probably would have been happy to do this.
But the truth is, if i’m in a situation where the emergency contact number is needed, i still think the first person i want contacted is my next of kin, no matter how far away he or she might be. In this age of direct-dial international phone calls, it’s no more difficult for someone to call my mother in Australia than it is for them to call my adviser in Washington.
I don’t know. This is such a terribly important subject that I’m thinking of setting up a series of threads in GD to explore the nuances. We just can’t do it justice in this pit thread.
I think the OP would have a point if the specific example weren’t so crystal clear. The OP can’t figure out that someone asking about NA beer for people under 21 on a US based board is posting from the US? And he/she has the temerity to call that person a moron? The question doesn’t make any sense if the person is posting from Canada, or France, or Mexico. State and County would have helped, but country is just redundant here.
I stated in my first post that my potential employers assumed all my former places of employment were in the US. THAT seems somewhat US-centric any way you slice it.
Well of course the OP (me) could figure it out, but it’s a little presumptuous to post questions about legalities and the like without stating the country involved. And believe me it happens all the time on here. It would be like me asking “What’s the federal sales tax on gasoline?” without stating (or having in my location) what country I’m in. It irks, that’s all. I felt like pitting something yesterday, and this is what stuck in my craw. No big deal.
I’ve been working in the US for about 8 years now, but at present my wife is living and working in Australia. Is it really odd for me to have her as my emergency contact? (And yes, my employer’s system will accept a foreign address and phone number, so it isn’t a problem that way.) If I suddenly had a serious illness, I’d want her to know about it, but I don’t think that she needs to be here in person to direct the emergency medical personnel. She probably wouldn’t mind being wokien up in the middle of the night, either, and if they needed her authorisation for something, I’m sure that faxes or the like would woirk.
Well, speaking of irks in craws, we had all these Canada people going on awhile back about Canadian Tire dollars. I envisioned round rubber dollar coins with treads, falling out of people’s pockets and bouncing all over the place. A disturbing image, I can tell you. And no one ever explained. I feel left out.
I can think of one particular poster who copped massive shit from everyone (well, not everyone, just a large collection of people being fuckwits) for regularly clarifying their location.
How about if you went to study in, say, New Zealand? Who would your emergency contact be on your arrival?
Watch your step, boy. Narrrrridge and Ipswich are no more in the ‘same neck of the woods’ as say, oooh, Manchester and Cheshire
Basing online behaviour on ‘physical location’ seems to me even more absurd. The whole point about my ‘American Intarwebs’ comment (which I like, by the way, so I’m going to keep using it ) is that the internet makes such physical connections irrelevant. Nothing, at least nothing obvious, defines the message board as ‘American’. Even the www.straightdope.com page seems to only make it clear by the copyright/trademark notice naming an American company (but then that doesn’t tell us where the servers are…)
Comparing it to the Daily Mirror website doesn’t hold water. If I was posting on the Chicago Reader’s main site, assuming it has a message board (I’ve never been there so I wouldn’t know), then fair enough, because it’s an online outlet of a regional physical entity. This place isn’t, we all buy our membership the same as each other. Assume that I’m from the USA just because I don’t say ‘just outside Ipswitch, in Ingerland, that’s in the UK, Europe’ in every post, and I feel perfectly entitled to think you’re a bit ignorant.
As an aside: I’ve come across postal-code parochialism outside of America. A major German music publisher made it impossible for me to place an order online, despite having a ‘United Kingdom’ option on the drop-down menu, because it would not allow more than six characters in the compulsory postcode box. Ours are seven or eight. Putting in just the first part didn’t work, because the card payment then got rejected. :rolleyes:
