4 May 2016, 2.30 pm
So. Here we go. Armed with the ceremonial mallet, I embark on the odyssey that is my last Council meeting. Somehow, it seems easier when you know it would no longer be worth the bother of deposing you even if someone felt moved to. I am sporting the swimming gala medal, its decorative portion freshly glued to its supporting substrate by Mr Davies’s own fair hand. It knocks against the table every time I sit forward, reminding me that I am Important and In Charge. This also boosts my confidence. Bring it on! And bring it on they do. We have two particularly crucial issues to debate today. The first is whether we should allow dead people to be CIPA members. Perhaps I should elaborate on this. In the new Bye-laws, which we are still trying to get past the Privy Council, we do not specify that in addition to being a qualified patent attorney and a generally good egg, in order to be a Fellow of CIPA you also have to be alive. Maybe we thought that went without saying – although to be honest I have come across committees where you wouldn’t want to take such things for granted. We do, however, stipulate that you will be thrown off Council if you die, because there is no room on Council for people who can’t pull their weight. This inconsistency has been queried. It must be resolved. We are hoping to do so without resorting to a full-blown referendum. Mr Davies, who is recording the debate for posterity, and also for the Journal, glances surreptitiously around the room. He is making sure there isn’t anyone here who is already dead but hasn’t owned up to it. A few years ago, there might well have been several. These days, Council has an altogether more modern outlook. Crucial issue number two is our newly-drafted (ie drafted in the last 24 months) social media policy. Now, there are some who think that social media is the Devil’s work, and others who think it is largely Mr Davies’s work, and possibly still others who think the two are the same. These people believe we should have detailed rules about what you are allowed to say on Twitter®, and that CIPA folk should only tweet from behind a professional persona to which nothing undignified or inappropriate or humorous or indeed human can be attributed. This is like when I first went on Twitter, hiding behind an anonymised picture of a hard-boiled egg, from where I struggled to tweet anything more contentious than the local weather report. Mr Davies says: but that would be missing the whole point about social media. He says: you cannot separate the personal and the professional any more. Being a human being is kind of what people like about you. And if they like you, they do business with you. It is worth mentioning, perhaps, that in the Good Old Days, before the advent of social media, Lucifer had numerous alternative sources of work. For instance, the people who most successfully separated their personal and professional lives were often the ones who were quietly getting on, in their entirely separate personal lives, with debauchery, corruption and abuse. Sometimes a veneer of professional dignity can be far more effective than a hard-boiled egg picture, if you’re looking to hide your malpractices. So it might be said – by someone else, obviously, not me – that Twitter came not a moment too soon. In the end, we decide that if CIPA is going to Do social media, we must Do it properly, which means getting on down there with the young things and blurring our personal and professional lives just like Mr Davies does. We think the risk of Mr Davies’s abusive comments about South West Trains® being attributed to CIPA, or of his photographs of home-cooked curries causing serious reputational damage – as opposed to stomach upsets – is probably small. Certainly it is not half so worrying as having a dead person on Council.
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