2 September 2015
Today CIPA is conducting an evil experiment to see how many meetings you can subject human beings to in one day before they break. Thus we have a Congress Steering Committee meeting from 10 till 11 am, an Internal Governance Committee meeting from 11 am till 1 pm, and from 1 pm till 2 pm a meeting of the CIPA bigwigs, ie the VeePee and the EyePeePee and the Onssek and the Chief Eggsek and also me. At 2.30 pm there is a Council meeting, which I must chair, and straight after that there is an Ordinary General Meeting, which I must also chair, so actually it is far from ordinary. And then, apparently, it is Happy Hour. I am not sure what there is to be happy about. Organising a meeting that starts at the same time as another meeting ends is not only unhealthy, it is a breach of basic human rights, such as for example the right to food and water and the right to check emails. The other subjects of the experiment survive longer, but I am well broken by half past one. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were the kind of person who could just sit doodling in a meeting, but no, I am the type who has to keep opening my mouth and volunteering to do things, or being volunteered to do things by someone else, so that I always emerge from a meeting with at least three new pieces of work and an almost limitless capacity for misunderstanding what I was supposed to do with them. By the time I arrive at the Council meeting, I am feeling quite fierce. I tell people to shut up a lot, and I make them put their hands up and speak in turn, and in this way we manage to finish in time to check our emails before the OGM starts. But in the break, three other people subject me to additional mini-meetings in corridors and small rooms and in the dark corners of CIPA Hall, because you cannot have a President standing idle. I believe, nevertheless, that it is what one might term a Productive Day. We almost finalise the Congress programme, apart from the bits I am supposed to have organised, and the mad bits that I have only just thought of. We check the accounts and the budget, and then ignore them both for long enough to decide how to fund regional meetings and international liaison trips and somewhere for the Pee to stay when the Pee lives a long way from London and is taking part in evil experiments for two days running. We decide some stuff about regulation, which is largely to do with me being too namby-pamby and friendly and not realising that everyone I meet is actually trying to get one up on CIPA. We decide some stuff about committees, which is largely to do with them having to make a list of the things they do and then Council saying The list is not good enough go and do it again, so that in the end every committee’s list will say simply “We make lists.” We almost decide CIPA’s view on the EU referendum, too, except that we cannot agree on the wording so then we decide that we need to take a little more time deciding. Luckily, the referendum is not going to happen any time soon. The rest of us refer to the referendum by the popular code-word Brexit. Mr Davies refuses to call it Brexit because he says Brexit is an ugly word, so he is particularly slow writing the minutes today because “referendum” may be more beautiful, as words go, but it has a whole lot more letters than “Brexit”. In the OGM I have to make things up as I go along because I have got the wrong glasses on and cannot read the agenda that Mr Davies has so carefully prepared by copying the last OGM agenda and changing the date. I make some things up about the diversity task force (da-da-da-DA!!), and the three non-Council members who have bothered to turn up to the OGM – as opposed to going directly to the Happy Hour – listen with rapt enthralled-ness. I show them a video about unconscious bias too. Everyone laughs and says We are not like that in the IP professions; we are not biased at all. Next month I will show them a video about irony.
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