It is not easy to impress American friends by being a professor. Everyone is a professor over there. When a student says she wants to be a professor she simply means she wants to teach in a college (my first reaction is a bit as if she told me she wanted to be a Nobel Prize winner. Who wouldn't?). If a student asks me how I like being a professor, it takes me a couple of seconds to realise that she is not wondering about my Very Special and Highly Exclusive position, but just how I feel about being an academic.
Many years ago in San Diego a colleague asked Staffan behind my back whether I was in fact a Full Professor. He was at least a bit impressed.
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Similar experiences (from a non-professorial point of view) over here: I always get confused by mails from foreign students addressing me as "professor" - "But I'm just an Assistentin!" Although I know that people in positions similar to mine are "assistant professors" in the Anglo-American university system, even floods of such mails cannot make me consider myself a professor. That would require at least a habilitation ...
You see: I happen to know what habilitation is, but try to explain it to an American.
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