10 June 2015, 12.30 pm
Our Chief Shouty Person Mr Lampert, and his Assistant Shouty Person Ms Hill, come to disturb my lunch break. They tell me The Guardian has been in touch, asking for our thoughts as to why there are so few women on the nominations list for the EPO’s European Inventor of the Year award. I tell them We do not talk to left-wing journalists, and return to my sandwich. But they are not going to let it rest. They say We must be able to shout something. That’s what we do. We shout. I sigh and put down my sandwich. So far as I can see, there are relatively few potential explanations for there not being many women on the EPO’s list:
None of these is going to be particularly palatable as a message to mainstream media, I suspect. Certainly Mr Lampert and Ms Hill look distinctly unimpressed. In the end we decide to frame our response around the namby-pamby diversity work. Only we do not mention the slug metaphor.
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10 June 2015, 11 am
Only six people turn up for this morning’s Congress Steering Committee meeting, three of whom are CIPA employees so can’t get out of it. The EyeEyePeePee joins us on the phone, but he is not really concentrating he is actually just looking at pictures of trains. We turn our attention to the draft programme. So far we have some really good ideas but a relatively small number of speakers. Someone with the initials TBC seems to have volunteered for a lot of the sessions, and I am worried this may come across as repetitive. On the plus side, we are going to replace the early morning Chai Tea in the Park session with a Short Jog around the Park session. I suggest that our sponsors might like to donate some running shirts for the occasion, or at the very least some runners’ goody-bags with energy gels and bananas and free samples of Vaseline®. I am looking forward to taking part in the Short Jog around the Park, because now I am the Pee everyone else will have to run behind me and this will make me feel incredibly powerful, even if only for the few short minutes that I manage to stay upright. 10 June 2015, 8 am
The morning starts with Domestic Chores. Now that I have a London pad I have to put out the rubbish in the mornings and clean the floor and things. I confess I didn’t expect the job description for the CIPA President to involve housekeeping activities, but it is a small price to pay for not being in a hotel room with a bed to not-bed ratio of 10:1. At CIPA we hold a teleconference about Occupational Standards. Occupational Standards are lists of things that people have to do in their jobs, and Mr Davies and Ms Sear have been saying for a long time that we ought to have some for the patent profession, so that we don’t feel left out compared to, say, the plumbers and the tax inspectors. So now we have a Working Group whose job it is to get some Standards. I have read up about how you prepare Occupational Standards. It is rather like a claim drafting exercise. You start with the really high level job descriptions, like “Has to be a patent attorney”, and then you get a bit more specific, like “Has to be able to draft patents”, and then you get progressively more specific until you end up with the absolute fundamentals of the job, like “Has to be able to write.” In between claim 1 and claim 10 you have infinite scope for nitpicking and pedantry. You also have to separate skills – which are things you’re able to do – from competencies – which are things where you deploy your skills for a useful purpose. Some of a patent attorney’s skills, for example nitpicking and pedantry, can’t actually be deployed for any useful purpose and so may not be associated with competencies at all. A better example might be that the ability to multiply is a skill, whereas generating an invoice – which usually involves quite a bit of multiplication – is a competency. Mr Davies and Ms Sear are agreed that we need to bring in an expert to do this work for us. And then the expert will talk to patent attorneys to find out what our work involves, and put it into a form that the rest of the world can recognise. This is not a job I would volunteer for if you paid me a million pounds (in which case, strictly, it wouldn’t be volunteering anyway). 8 June 2015, 7 pm
I attend a banquet laid on by the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives. This necessitates the donning of a posh frock and quite a lot of breathing in, especially after the pastries and granola. Also some shoes that I can network in but not walk in. It is a shame that so many shoes are unable to cope with both. 8 June 2015, 8.15 am
My head hurts. This is partly due to the Prosecco, partly due to the early start, but mainly due to last night’s cubicle doors which were actually not doors at all. I am in early for our “Diversity in IP” breakfast meeting. The Americans thought it was going to be a “Women in IP” breakfast meeting, but at CIPA the Men in IP get peevish if you leave them out of anything, especially if it involves food, so we had to let them come too. Team CIPA has done us proud. The Breakfast Pixies have been. Also the Flower Fairies, who have brought a vase of sunflowers to cheer up CIPA Hall, because Diverse People (women, for example) like flowery things. But the Breakfast Pixies did not bring honey nut cornflakes, and I cannot help wondering what is the point of breakfast without honey nut cornflakes? Once everyone has got over the disappointment of not having honey nut cornflakes, and eaten pastries and granola instead, I disappoint them further by standing up to make a speech. It is a rousing speech about diversity in the IP professions. I use my gardening metaphor. I say we must not sow our diversity seeds on stony ground, among the sceptics, and someone tweets that I am using biblical references, which I think God will be having a laugh about. I say we must protect our plants from pests and diseases, and not let racist and sexist and homophobic slugs gobble them up. People seem to like the slug metaphor. Even though they have only just finished their breakfasts. The American Women in IP tell us about the events they organise, which all seem to revolve around food. They do breakfast meetings, and lunch-time meetings, and dinner meetings. And when they do breakfast meetings, they start at 6.30 am, which makes us look a bit pathetic only rolling up at 8.15. Still, I bet they don’t have a Patent Attorneyettes’ Afternoon Tea Society. 7 June 2015
For some reason, the International Liaison Committee thought it would be appropriate for me to help them entertain some American guests. We take these guests to a rooftop bar in the heart of somewhere in London. It is a little too trendy for my liking. I do not think it is right for patent attorneys to be in a place like this, where people seem to be wearing their clothes upside down, or not wearing them at all, or wearing somebody else’s, and where the walls are all black and mostly indistinguishable from the doors. I feel about thirty years too old. But the Americans love it. They look out at the London skyline, resplendent in the evening sunshine, and eat suspicious-looking half-bits of food called tapas, and drink Prosecco and laugh a lot and ask me questions about the scenery that I cannot answer. I think that bit is London, I say, helpfully. And over there is the London train station, and over here is a river, and that big building to the east is Quite New whereas that one to the west is Quite Old. Luckily some of the buildings are labelled, so I am able to point out with a fair degree of confidence the Royal Opera House and the Burger King®. Later I venture through the trendy crowds to the ladies’ loo. It takes me three attempts to find a cubicle door and on two of them I hit my head on a wall by mistake. 5 June 2015
“Have you not read my email about the Strategic Plan?” I ask Mr Davies. There is a brief silence. Then Mr Davies confesses that because I send so many emails, he has taken to auto-directing them to a “special” folder to deal with later. I’ll bet he has. And the special folder is probably in the recycling bin. I am hurt. I concede I send a lot of emails, but they are all beautiful emails and they are my babies and I don’t like to think of them being ignored. I may have to fire Mr Davies for insubordination. But not by email, obviously. 3 June 2015, noon
We are inducing this year’s new Council members. The induction process involves eating sandwiches with the old Council members until you understand just how much of a mistake you’ve made. Then we sit the newbies round the boardroom table in CIPA Hall and ask them questions about the things they hope to do while they’re on Council, which is always good for a laugh at the start of a new Presidential year. What is particularly entertaining, I realise, is subsequently to ask the old Council members to explain what they hoped to achieve when they first joined, and what went wrong. It turns out that one of the new Council members is in league with the Biscuit Pixies, because she has managed to make them bring some special biscuits to help her make friends with her new Council colleagues. I resist the urge to tell her it will take a lot more than biscuits. And that it probably won’t be worth it anyway. The biscuits are called “Regional Biscuits”. In other words, they are not-London biscuits. They are probably not proper biscuits at all, in fact. I am deeply suspicious. 3 June 2015, 2.30 pm
It is time to man up and chair my first Council meeting. How hard can this be? I think to myself, as I sit chewing my nails in a corner of the CIPA stationery cupboard. I have chaired task forces and committee meetings and countless meet-the-members’-biscuits events. I have presided over family mealtimes, for heaven’s sake: surely it cannot be that bad? So I take a deep breath, and in I go. When you chair a meeting you have to strike a difficult balance between allowing everyone to be heard and getting stuff done. True to form, I succeed in doing neither. In my defence, if you allow everyone to be heard when the “everyone” is 26 cantankerous patent attorneys, you might as well bring a camp-bed into the meeting room and stay for a week. When I get a spare moment between agenda items, I glance round the room. Some people look bored. Some look cross. Some look like they are checking their emails. Some of them have drawn breath and are about to speak; they are mostly the ones who have just finished speaking on the previous item. Several are talking amongst themselves. I glare at all these people. They glare back. I take this to mean that there has been some form of procedural impropriety, and that I have caused it. On the plus side, we finish bang on 5 pm, and I only have to use the ceremonial gavel three times, one of which is to wake myself up. And it was not entirely unproductive, this meeting. For instance, we have decided: · That the three year strategic plan will last us three years, which it was designed for, so we will not need to waste any time doing a Not-a-Council-meeting with flip charts and balloons this summer. (Shame!) · That if the UK comes out of the EU, there will be gloom and doom for ever more. · And that this is outrageous. · But that we must think very carefully before admitting as much to the outside world, and in the meantime the committees will give some thought to quantifying the gloom and doom so that when we formulate a CIPA policy on the subject, it will be unassailably accurate. · That various other terribly tedious things are OK not to talk about. · That various other potentially tedious things are also OK not to talk about because nobody has read the relevant papers. · That we will all meet for drinks at the Seven Stars afterwards. I do not go to the Seven Stars. I think perhaps the others will want to talk crossly to one another about my abysmal chairing, and I would rather not hear them doing it. 2 June 2015, 6 pm
When I have finished all the meetings, and some phone calls, and dealt with 1,001 emails – by sending 998 back – I pop home to my London pad. (Does that not sound impressive?) Then I pop out for a meal with my daughter, who is at university in London. Back in the Wess Curntry, this process would take the whole evening. In London, you finish your meal and still have three hours spare to do the grocery shopping and catch a glimpse of Michael Flatley’s bottom. (Should you be that way inclined. Which I am not. I stick to the groceries.) My daughter knows I am not young and carefree. But she also knows I have a credit card. So she is prepared to humour me for a few hours in return for a full stomach and some complimentary alcohol. 3 June 2015, 10 am The emails keep coming. Generally, they wait until I’m in a meeting, and then 47 of them arrive at once so that by the time I come out of the meeting, I am already an hour behind. This morning I have managed to get an hour behind almost before I arrived at CIPA HQ. It seems that everybody wants to copy the Pee on everything they write, presumably because they can then claim that the buck stops with somebody else. There is nothing like a Someone-at-the-Top, however incompetent, to collect other people’s bucks. I put the bucks in a neat pile under the desk I have pinched from Mr Lampert. When the pile is big enough, I will give Mr Lampert his desk back. One of the emails this morning is from Mr Davies. It is about setting up a mentoring scheme. Fantastic, I think, I could do with someone to share my woes with. Probably I could pass them my bucks too. I presume that’s how mentoring works. Apparently Mr Davies is trained in mentoring. But I imagine being mentored by Mr Davies is exhausting. There is only so much enthusiasm you can take before you decide you might actually prefer to be a miserable sod after all. |
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