28 April 2016, 9 pm
It is time to leave; even I can see that. In fact, to be fair, it was time to leave half an hour ago. But I discover that the gateway, through which I entered the tucked-away lane that doesn’t exist, is now firmly shut. I panic, thinking I may be trapped for ever in this oak-panelled nether-world, unable to get back to the parts of London that do exist, like the Tesco® Metro. Luckily, a cloaked Keeper of the Temple emerges from the shadows and reveals the secret to magicking the gateway open and retrieving the lost world (and supermarkets) beyond. The secret is a green button marked “Press to exit”, but there is also a spell you have to incant at the same time, in Latin. I am usually good at decanting. I am not so good at turning round three times on the spot, which results in the spell being mumbled to a cobblestone and a 19th Century crisp packet. But at least I make it to Tescos. Phew! I stagger my way back across the real parts of London, to meet the other two students for dinner. Where have you been? they ask. We’ve already eaten six plates of tapas, drunk your first three gin and tonics and done another two loads of washing. I drink more gin and tonic so as to continue the confidence sharing theme, and they obligingly share a number of further confidences, such as: we threw your running kit off the drying rack to make way for the extra laundry. And: we haven’t done the washing-up from lunch yet. And: we wrapped your laptop in cling film. Because we could. Nobody shares any confidences about Vestal Virgins, though, which is a relief.
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28 April 2016, 6.30 pm
I am in one of the oak-panelled parts of London. It is the kind of place that people like me always feel they have reached by accident. The oak panels line a grand room, set in a building so majestic it calls itself a Temple, and the Temple sits in a quaint yet imposing courtyard, tucked away down a tiny lane that only exists for those who know about it, and possibly doesn’t exist at all except in a parallel universe running to 19th Century protocols. The occasion is a party in honour of Mr Heap, the IPReg Chair. Mr Heap is retiring (participle, not adjective) and is keen to celebrate the opportunity not to work with patent attorneys ever again. He looks more than a little demob-happy. He is not the only one. Mr Heap makes a speech, during which some naughty people whisper to one another at the back, but it wasn’t me honest and if it was, it was only for the purpose of sourcing another glassful with which to toast Mr Heap’s many achievements. In recognition of those achievements, the ITMA Pee and I present him with gifts. Mr Davies takes a photo of me presenting a gift. In the photo, it looks as though I am punching Mr Heap in the face. I’m sure I wasn’t. I mean, I know I’d had a celebratory glass or two, but surely I wouldn’t have punched the retiring IPReg Chairman? Mr Davies’s photo was either very badly timed, or very cleverly edited. At events like this, I feel it is important to partake fully of the alcohol on offer. This is because when people get drunk together, they share all manner of confidences and juicy tittle-tattle, which are valuable as Strategic Intelligence. And the more drunk the listener, I have found, the more will be revealed to her. So this evening I make sure I am sufficiently drunk to be revealed to. The only problem is, I am then too drunk to process what is revealed, or to remember it afterwards. While I am sufficiently drunk to be revealed to, one of the IPReg people promises to organise another party, to celebrate the end of my presidency. What he doesn’t promise is to invite me. 28 April 2016, 4 pm
Now I am at a joint CIPA/LES seminar. The LES is the Licensing Executives Society, and it contains people who are less interested in the IP procurement process than in using the IP once procured. If this strikes you as a strange way of prioritising, you are in absolutely the right profession (ie you are a patent attorney) but you may be out of a job within the next decade. Just saying. The theme of the seminar is how to build an IP portfolio and strategy for a small business. There are some really good talks. Most of them can be summed up as: if you are going to build an IP portfolio, do it properly. For example:
You can get Competitive Intelligence, says one of the speakers, using IP Analytics. Think IP data, double the complexity and then turn it into a picture. This is a neat way of showing you just how bad your IP portfolio is compared to other people’s, just how close you are to being bitten on the backside, and how big a gulf there is between your IP strategy and the things that really matter. Only in this way can you become Competitively Intelligent. If miserable. Ah yes, but, says another speaker, what exactly is strategy? There is a nervous silence. You cannot just go around asking difficult questions like this, undermining the very architecture of our existence. This speaker goes on to make further provocative comments about the amount of jargon patent attorneys use when talking to business clients. He says there is no point telling a COO that you have an Added Subject Matter Problem, or an Article 54(3) Citation, or an Ex Post Facto Analysis; they are likely to ask you to go home until you’re not contagious any more. This is jargon, he says, and jargon is bad. To illustrate this more clearly, he asks if anyone in the room knows what a Chinese Wax Job is. This yields another nervous silence. A Chinese Wax Job sounds like something else you wouldn’t want to tell a COO you suffered from. But luckily, it is to do with surfing. So that’s alright. If your clients are into surfing. If they’re not, you must refrain from talking to them about both Added Subject Matter and Chinese Wax Jobs. The second half of the seminar, ie post-Red Bull®, is chaired by Yours Truly. I try to chair it fiercely, but the fact is that no one – either on the panel or in the audience – is willing to take me seriously. This is because one of the earlier speakers told us that if you want to grow a thriving business around a good piece of technology, you absolutely have to go to a decent patent attorney, and that decent patent attorneys work in large, established, high-class patent attorney firms, for example in London, or in London, and definitely not in some small, tin-pot practice in some backwater like, say, Exeter. He did not specifically say Do not touch with a barge-pole somebody who claims to be a patent attorney but actually lives in Zummerzet, because if Exeter is a backwater it is nothing to the back-backwaters that surround it. But the implication was there. To be honest, with less than two weeks to go until I can stop pretending to be up to the job of CIPA President, I care little for whether a roomful of IP professionals is prepared to take me seriously. I’m just glad they’re not throwing things at me. 28 April 2016, 11.30 am
I have finished sadly reflecting on the ageing process, and must go out and do some work. The other patent attorney is still telling anecdotes as I leave. There is a smell of fresh laundry – which the only woman in the flat has removed from the laundry receiving compartment and hung on a laundry receiving framework aka a drying rack – and fruit cake. I suspect the first patent attorney will come back immediately the coast is clear, whether or not he has actually inspected a trade mark file in the interim. 28 April 2016, 10 am
One of the students has got bored with the laundry lectures and the elongate longitudinal debate, and left to inspect a trade mark file at the IPO. Or so he says. I thought you inspected files online these days, but apparently not if they contain a lot of paperwork. So much for the digital age. Surely a large amount of paperwork is exactly the problem that electronic file inspection was designed to address? The other student and I sit at our laptops and deal with our emails. He is a noisy worker, who does a lot of sighing and swearing and keeps stopping to share anecdotes, like in a CIPA committee discussion. He shows me more pictures of his Vestal Virgins, and some of a robot that will soon be able to deliver your groceries. I am more attracted to the robot, I have to say, though it looks insufficiently large to carry my weekly grocery shop and insufficiently robust to get up my drive anyway. The emails progress slowly. Soon we decide it is time to break off and have coffee and fruit cake, from our seemingly endless supply of Further and Better Provisions. It is a sad reflection of the ageing process that our chosen snack is fruit cake, rather than half-melted chocolate digestives or packets of Haribo®. But we only really do it for the chance to wrap the fruit cake in one of our new freezer bags. 28 April 2016, 6.30 am
At Studentville, I am the first up, which means I get first grab at the cling film. Yay! After I have wrapped a few things, like my phone and my driving licence, so as to prolong their shelf life, I go for a run, before returning to see what Provisions we have to pool for our student breakfast. It is a sad reflection of the ageing process that our breakfast provisions consist largely of muesli and fruit, which I do not remember ever happening in my real student days (I’m not sure muesli had even reached the UK back then). Also the breakfast milk hasn’t yet curdled, which is a disappointment – we did our best to make things squalid but the cling film has thwarted us. At least we have achieved that authentic sleepy bodies smell. After the muesli, we decide it is time we did some laundry. We have discovered there is a laundry basket at the flat, into which you can put your used bed linen when you want the Pixies to deal with it. But the laundry basket is full and we cannot find the Pixies. There is nothing for it: one of us will have to engage with the Washing Machine. It is a sad reflection of the ageing process that one of us actually knows how to do this. Guess who it is. I cannot be the one who does the laundry, I say, because I am the only woman and it might look like you two are being sexist. The others look glumly at the symbols on the washing powder drawer and are clearly wondering how they are going to fit a whole duvet cover into the compartment marked with a pretty flower. I sigh. OK, I say – modifying my approach in the interests of procedural expediency – I will do it this time, but I will show you how so that next time, you can do it. This elicits a smile of relief, followed by a distinct lack of interest in the presentation that follows. I should have made it more engaging by talking about “laundry cleaning product dispensing means” and “compartment adapted to receive one or more items of soiled laundry” and “the one or more items of soiled laundry being, together, of a weight and volume commensurate with the capacity of said compartment, which by the way is not limitless”. While I grapple with the washing, the other two begin a far more interesting discussion about the meaning of the terms “elongate” and “longitudinal”. This is what patent attorneys do when they are trying to avoid the washing up. I am minded to throw something elongate at them, in a longitudinal direction, but I cannot find any skewers. 27 April 2016, 10 pm
I return to the student flat, which soon fills up with delusional old patent attorneys. We think briefly about an all-night student party, but decide in the end that a cup of tea would be better. We chat about Old Times. We mean, of course, the Old Times before EPC 2000 (for the other two, before EPC anything), when you could add a numerical range to your claims based on the top left and bottom right cells of the results table in Example 2b. Good times… Then one of them offers to show us a photo, of the troupe of young dancing girls he looks after at weekends. We say: There had better be some good explanations to go with the photo. Fortunately, there are, and both the dancing girls and the looking after of the dancing girls turn out to be perfectly innocent after all. But we cannot resist teasing him about his Vestal Virgins from then on. The other two have returned with a carrier bag of Further and Better Provisions. They are very proud of themselves for having remembered these Further and Better Provisions en route back to the flat. It is a sad reflection of the ageing process that what they are so proud of having purchased is cling film and freezer bags, in order to store more sensibly the leftovers from lunch. It is, in fact, a sad reflection of the ageing process that there even are any leftovers. We cling film the leftovers, and a few other things as well just for fun, because we can. Then we have a discussion about who gets which sofa bed and how to distribute the available bedding, and which of us is going to do the domestic stuff like uniting the duvets with their complementary duvet covers, bearing in mind that since I am the only woman it cannot possibly be me because of the risk of accusations of sexism. It is a discussion that any patent attorney would be proud of, and after much fierce yet dignified argument we reach an extremely precise conclusion. I do the duvets. The reason I do the duvets is that I am the only one of us who has a clue how to set about the process. The other two were disappointed to learn that duvets and their covers do not come pre-assembled. 27 April 2016, 6 pm
We are holding a reception to mark the launch of the 8th Edition of the Black Book. The two editors are there, and the publisher, and the kind people who contributed hours of toil and midnight oil in order to create this impressive tome. Also there are five copies of the book on display, which are causing concern because we do not know the load-bearing capacity of CIPA Hall and at some point soon we are going to have to pay the landlord his Deelapidayshuns. The only thing missing is the food, which has suffered a small but unfortunate mishap. The Life Sciences Committee met at CIPA this lunchtime, and consumed not only their own lunch but also the food that had been delivered for the evening reception. It sounds as though they turned the refreshments into a full agenda item. Unlucky Gary and Amazing Dwaine have been sent out to source an alternative supply of reception grub, with which they return just in time. The irony is that no one gets round to eating the reception grub anyway, and CIPA is thus left with a large but sadly perishable supply of Life Sciences Committee agenda items. I do not think the Life Sciences Committee plan to meet again for another couple of months. The chances are the sandwiches will not make it. The Chief Black Book Editor says a few words, to thank and congratulate his team. He then hands over to me, in my official capacity as CIPA Pee, to say a few words on behalf of CIPA. I am not quite ready for this, although arguably I should have been. But I duly say a few words and the others duly applaud, and above all I sound enthusiastic, and that is what counts. 27 April 2016, 4 pm
I have a coffee and a little chat with the VeePee. We talk about what CIPA is going to be like when he is the Pee, which is very soon. I have a massive grin on my face throughout. I do hope it is not putting him off: he has such lovely plans. But the truth is, whether his plans are lovely or not, and whether they work or not, they are his problem not mine. We return to tell Mr Davies about the plans. Poor Mr Davies: every year he has to adjust to a new Pee and a new set of plans, and he has to pretend it is all part of the Grand Scheme of Things. Each Pee has a different approach, and the only constant is that we are all a little bit mad, although each of us is a little bit mad in a different way. And I am a huge bit mad, and in too much detail, but luckily for Mr Davies he only has two weeks left of pretending I am part of the Grand Scheme of Things. No one really bought that anyway. 27 April 2016, noon
Today, I am sharing the London flat with two other patent attorneys, one of whom owns it. I do my best to make him feel at home. Three patent attorneys is enough to constitute a party, I reckon. Although, we are all too old to do parties, really, and at least one of us never did parties when she was young anyway, for fear of enjoying herself. We have brought Provisions. The Provisions are a random collection of M&S® packages containing things that M&S assured us were useable as lunch. Some of them are healthy things, like fruit and fruit cake; others are more for the purpose of lifting the spirit, like scotch eggs and chocolate chip cookies. We spread our pooled Provisions around the kitchen surfaces and eat with our fingers, because three people crammed into a flat and a question mark over who gets to sleep in which sofa bed is beginning to feel like a regression to student days. (It is a delusional feeling, but we are happy to be deluded by it.) In true student fashion, we each of us hope one of the others will do the washing up. I am the only woman, so as a matter of principle I cannot volunteer to do any domestic duties, in case the others feel awkward about sexism. |
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