Congrats on getting it finished.

Ave, O Doctore!

Perhaps you should also include an unacknowledgements page. You could leave it blank, but all people who know in their hearts that they were supposed to help you, but didn’t, would know where they belong (if not present in the acknowledgements page).

The author of this book, its settings and its characters are entirely fictitious. There is no such place as Melbourne. The Australian Labor Party exists only in the imagination of its own members…

Dr. Cat: ‘…dodgy “PhD by Thinly Disguised Autobiography”…’

Well I say why not. After all, if we can have US Presidency by Dodgy Autobiography, anything’s game…

The acknowledgment I’ve been saving up for my next publication.

“To my grammar school teachers who taught me how to read and write the english good.”

You can out those who have hindered you as long as public exposure is purely accidental, as occurred after Samuel Johnson wrote to his patron, Lord Chesterfield, after the Dictionary was published and Chesterfield gave it a positive review:

Seven years, my lord, have now passed, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before….

Is not a patron my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it: till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which providence has enabled me to do for myself.

In the Dictionary itself, Johnson confined himself to providing the following definition:

Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

Student (Rowan Atkinson): A monsoon is a long white pole you stick out the window to scare the birds away, while a mongoose is a mediaeval Hungarian stomach pump.

Quizmaster (John Cleese): No, I can only give you half points for that. The correct answer is: a monsoon is a big wind, and a mongoose … isn’t!

Might have looked a bit classier if I translated it into Latin. Sounds like you survived your own thesis defence OK Mark. I once heard (friend of a friend) of someone who found the experience so traumatic she forcibly repressed all memory of it. Hate to think what substances that would have required!

(No, I never DO tire of that one)

Except it took a lot longer than 900 days.

Glad I did, but, ay!

Computer software can often feel like the bureaucracy in The Trial…

I remember telling a friend who had studied law about anti-patterns in computer software architecture, she remarked on how legislation seems to display similar anti-patterns. My favourite is the big ball of mud.

I don’t think my acknowledgments page did justice to the trials and tribulations of a PhD that took six and a half years to complete…

Despair, poverty, ambition, rivalry, poverty, juggling one’s social and emotional life with one’s work, despair, blind alleys, poverty, drama, poverty, dreams of wanting to kill supervisors/administrators/persons in authority, and despair. Did I mention poverty? It’s a blood-spattered jungle in there.

Also depression, poverty, substance addiction, poverty, badly designed progress report forms, complaints to the university payroll office which were never responded to, poverty, tensions with flatmates who neither share nor understand your obsessions, poverty, and worst of all despondently contemplating life without the scholarship as it nears expiry date.

I once found myself fantasising about acknowledging those who’d helped and then outing those who’d hindered, but I think it’s against the law.

it may or may not be pertinent to mention that the Australian Workers Union and the NSW Teachers Federation were not mentioned on my ‘Acknowledgements’ page.

That said, I’m pretty sure that there would have been room for a Kafka quotation or two in my dissertation – computer software can often feel like the bureaucracy in The Trial…