7 December 2015
Student induction day #2. Pretty much the same as student induction day #1, except there are more delegates. Clearly word has got round that this is the bestest CIPA and ITMA event of the year. The new students quickly make friends with one another and after that we cannot shut them up. I expect they are exchanging notes on the best and the worst firms to train with, who pays the highest salaries and who throws the best Christmas parties. After Mr Hodkinson’s talk about professional ethics, they exchange notes on which firms break the most rules from the IPReg Code of Conduct. After Mr Dixon’s talk about business practice, they exchange notes on which firms charge the highest rates and whose billing figures are best. After my talks they exchange notes on the latest episode of I’m A Celebrity, because they’ve never heard such rubbish in their lives. In the afternoon, Mr Luckhurst gives his usual soothing presentation about stress in the workplace. He describes the symptoms of stress, which I can virtually recite off by heart now. Not cleaning your shoes. Not putting your makeup on. Not going down the gym. Too much alcohol. Yeah, yeah. I am sure these are not really signs of stress, just signs of getting your priorities right. Of course, as everyone knows, if you are suffering from stress you should talk to someone about it. If that talk results in you and the someone going down the pub together, that is not necessarily a solution to your stress problem (see above re symptoms). If it results in you and the someone going to the gym, that is a marginally better result although probably more expensive. If it results in you and the someone going into an office together, shutting the door and filling out a P45, you have picked the wrong someone to talk to. It seems to me that if going down the pub is both a response to and an indicator of stress, then whoever invented pubs was playing a cruel trick on us all. Later, Mr Harris from ITMA gives a talk about qualifying as a trade mark attorney. Mr Harris can remember the Bad Old Days when the trade mark exams were so difficult that if you plotted the marks on a cumulative frequency curve the only way you could get a pass was by quantum tunnelling. Fortunately, ITMA got rid of the qualifying exams and now you have to go on qualifying courses instead. The cumulative frequency curve for a qualifying course looks a little bit different, because if you have paid the qualifying course fee you don’t expect to have to resort to quantum tunnelling to get your certificate at the end of it.
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4 December 2015, 2.30 pm
Now we are at the CIPA staff Christmas lunch. I am still wearing my CIPA lapel pin, but also a paper hat. We are not served our food until well past 3 pm. A couple of peanuts have proved inadequate to maintain my blood sugar levels and I am unable to drink because I am driving home from the station tonight, so despite the paper hat I am in Grumpy Old Cow mode. As a Grumpy Old Cow, I am not hugely impressed with my lunch. As a Grumpy Old Cow, I regard a rubbery onion tart as a failed onion tart, whether or not it benefits from a 5g blob of goat’s cheese and what I believe is termed a “drizzling”, but is actually just a random squirt, of balsamic acid. As a Grumpy Old Cow, I would rather my sea bass had been lightly steamed and not boiled in a dishwasher on the Vesuvius setting. As a Grumpy Old Cow, I do not think it too much to ask for my Christmas pudding to be served piping hot rather than just above body temperature, and I am uncomfortable with the after-taste it carries, of meat pie and pencil sharpenings. The others say: How do you know what pencil sharpenings taste like? I say Pencil sharpenings is what we had for us tea oop north and we was glad of it. I say Not everyone can afford to use truffle shavings to garnish their food. I can tell they are thinking that social mobility may not be such a good idea after all. Still, we manage to have a good time despite the food. Because the company is excellent. Because we all love each other very much, especially the ones who were pretending not to drink spirits. Because we are thrilled with the paper hats and rubbish jokes and plastic toys from our Christmas crackers. I may be in Grumpy Old Cow mode, but I can still have fun catapulting my green plastic frog into the VeePee’s drink. Next I am going to aim for Mr Davies’s Santa hat. 4 December 2015, 1 pm
Meanwhile, back at CIPA HQ, someone has moved the austerity-themed Christmas tree into the library and Secret Santa has visited and put presents under it. Secret Santa has also put out a paper plate with mince pies on, and a couple of bowls of peanuts. Amazing Dwaine opens a bottle of something fizzy and the others in the membership team pretend not to be opening bottles of spirits. Mr Davies has put on a lime green and toxic red Santa hat, with a structure like something out of a Dr Seuss book, which is not at all secret but probably ought to be. Kirsty hands out the presents. I am well chuffed with mine. It is a Presidential Survival Kit. This includes two cans of gin and tonic, some chocolates with gin in and some chocolates with whisky in. Enough to get me through about three hours of the average CIPA meeting. Somebody clearly knows me well. The EyeEyePeePee’s present is a chocolate tool kit and a chocolate train. They are not to the same scale, which I think bothers him. I would have got him some chocolate rivets, but I couldn’t find any. 4 December 2015, 11 am
A group of us meet with two visitors from WIPO and two from the UK IPO. I am wearing my CIPA lapel pin. Obvs. Mr Roberts is there as well. He is on coffee duty. It is a posh pod coffee machine with a selection of different coloured posh pods to put in it. Mr Roberts expresses the view that the pods are all the same anyway, whatever their colours. The rest of us are not convinced. Some of the pods look distinctly like tea bags to me. One of the WIPO visitors takes over. This meeting is a bit like the one last week with the nice men from the EPO, ie it is about WIPO telling us how much they love our feedback and the chance to have lunch with us, and us telling them how much we love them coming over to tell us this. Some of the discussions are about the UK joining something called the Hague System, which is something to do with registered designs, which are some other things I know very little about, of which there are many. Apparently it is easy to get a Hague design and there is a really simple online form which even a Brit could not cock up, and potentially this one really simple form could lead you to worldwide design domination. It sounds great to me that the UK is going to be part of such a fantastic system and I wonder why we didn’t think of it before. Especially if we are planning on leaving one of the other fantastic multinational systems we’re part of. 3 December 2015
I am officially Famous! There are published articles about the Grand Diversity Launch Event (da-da-da-DAAA!!!), and they have my photo in! The interview I did the other week has also been published, and in it I sound almost articulate so I think the nice journalist must have made a few things up afterwards. The article refers to me as “Brewster”. Like “Cameron”. Or “Mussolini”. I would rather it said “President Brewster”, but I guess you only get that kind of reverence if you’re looking after a whole country as opposed to 2,500 cantankerous but essentially harmless patent attorneys. I am proud to be officially Famous. I consider sending my mum copies of the articles but then I remember my mum can’t do hyperlinks because of her stupid computer which is always on the blink, especially on the days she isn’t wearing her glasses, so instead I will give her a framed copy of my Presidential business card for Christmas. Of course, being officially Famous has its downsides. I confess I’m a little scared to go out in case I’m mobbed. I imagine the paparazzi are clamouring at my front door even now. I take a little time off from the emails to practise my autograph, just in case. Meanwhile, at CIPA HQ the main downside is that Mr Lampert, our Chief Shouty Person who has not yet finished his new Social Media Policy on account of I keep distracting him, now lives in a perpetual state of terror that I am going to say something unwise or undignified which will be published before he can do anything to stop it. These are some of his worst fears:
2 December 2015, 6 pm
There is a happy hour after the Council meeting, but I do not go on the basis that it is pretty much never just an hour. I am feeling the effect of three days’ worth of meetings and three days’ worth of London crowds, not to mention three days’ worth of gin and tonics crammed into one evening on Monday and an exhausting Presidential Summit on Tuesday. It is time to head back to the Wess Curntry to find out what my children have been doing with their advent calendars. If I don’t keep an eye on them they might open more than one window at a time and try to con me into bringing Christmas forward a few days. Worse still, they might start opening my advent calendar too. My advent calendar contains miniature Lindt® chocolates. In general I am opposed to the miniaturisation of chocolate, but I can make an exception for Lindt. 2 December 2015, 5.15 pm
I am just about to close the meeting (fiercely, of course, and spattered with gold) when Mr Poore says: Stop! There is still something Important and Ceremonial to do! He presents me ceremoniously with a CIPA lapel pin. It is a gift from the Past Presidents. They would have presented it to me at the Past Presidents’ dinner the other week, only I declined to go to the dinner because it was being held in a gentlemen’s club. Until recently, I had thought that gentlemen’s clubs didn’t exist anymore, except in period dramas. But they do. And since I have neither the testosterone levels nor the good breeding to count as a gentleman (I get pretty close on the testosterone front, but nowhere near on the breeding), I decided that this was not the place for me. The Past Presidents were, apparently, devastated that I did not join them, but managed to have a passable time all the same. But I digress. Every year at the Past Presidents’ dinner, the Past Presidents invite the current President to make a little gentlemanly speech about what CIPA is up to, and then present him with a pair of CIPA cufflinks. The cufflinks are extremely special, because only Presidents are allowed to wear them. It is therefore a Great Honour to be presented with them. Except, of course, if you are not a gentleman. Clearly this possibility was not envisaged when CIPA’s ceremonial rituals were devised, which would have been about the time of the Industrial Revolution. A period also renowned for testosterone and breeding. In addition to telling people why I did not want to go to dinner in a place that regarded my insufficiently manly underwear as a barrier to entry, I also let it be known that I did not think cufflinks would suit me. I may have used a slightly different turn of phrase, but it amounted to the same thing: cufflinks are a no-no. And so, with a gentlemanliness that impresses me still, the Past Presidents instructed their jeweller to take a pair of CIPA cufflinks, saw the cufflinky part off one of them and attach a lapel pin fixture in its place. Or possibly they asked the EyeEyePeePee to do this with his rail-side soldering kit. Either way, I now have a CIPA lapel pin of my very own, and for generations to come, CIPA Presidentesses will be able to enjoy a suitably bespoke form of decoration. I feel mightily proud. 2 December 2015, 2.30 pm
The Christmas Pixies have brought Christmassy cakes to today’s last-Council-meeting-before-Christmas. The difference between a Christmassy cake and a normally cake is that a Christmassy cake carries a veneer of gold spray paint, which may or may not be edible but since it’s Christmas, who cares? Fortunately, everyone knows you do not need to say thank you to the Pixies, because they only visit In Secret. So nobody does. (And for the record, the Pixies do not need permission from the Internal Governance Committee, because they pay for their own cakes and conduct their own pre-consumption tastings I mean risk assessments.) It is a long Council meeting, even with me being fierce in the Chair. This may be due to my having a mouthful of gold paint for a good proportion of the time, and thus being unable to shout at people. When I do shout at people, a festive spray of gold stars accompanies the shouting, which might almost look angelic if you were feeling really Christmassy, but they are not and so it doesn’t, and either way it rather ruins the effect of the fierceness. Also the damp cakey bits are undignified. We get lots done, though. We say No to several things. We say This is Outrageous to some other things. And we say What will our members think?? to some more things. Then we say, Actually, yes, what will our members think? And someone suggests asking our members what they will think but someone else says No, not yet and we all look relieved, because none of us is entirely sure how Survey Monkey® works but we daren’t admit it. Despite all the nay-saying, we still have lots left on the agenda for next time, in case we were thinking January might be a quiet month. Something to look forward to post-Christmas. |
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