15 January 2016, 9.30 am
The EyeEyeEyeEyeEyeEyePeePee, Mr Brown, leads a 6-strong CIPA delegation on an adventure across Geneva’s public transport network. Mr Brown knows his way around Geneva because he has been to WIPO to lots of committee meetings – the type of meetings, incidentally, which take several days and get very little done because at the last minute one of the 130 hugely diverse delegates wakes up, remembers what IP is and stamps his feet in the interests of national sovereignty. Mr Brown had also given us some laudably clear instructions to help us find our way from the airport to the hotel last night, again via Geneva’s public transport network. These I failed miserably to execute, managing not only to pay for a ticket which I should have got free (the IGC will kill me) but also to get so disorientated that I boarded the first train I found and spent the next twenty minutes terrified I would end up in Innsbruck. Anyway. I did not end up in Innsbruck. I ended up in the right city, in the right hotel, and now I am on the right tram (I presume) with the VeePee, the EyePeePee, the Onssek, the EyeEyeEyeEyeEyeEyePeePee and the Chair of the Trade Marks Committee. And we are all off to see the Director General of WIPO and his pals. The VeePee has a headache. It is the trauma of no longer being on holiday. We give him a couple of paracetamol but scant sympathy.
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14 January 2016, 4 pm
I am off to Geneva! Yesterday I had to explain to my teenage daughter that Geneva is a city, not a beauty salon or a restaurant: she is studying sociology not geography, dur! Geneva, I said, perhaps a tad pompously, is in Switzerland, the land of cuckoo clocks, army knives, posh watches and even posher banking, political neutrality and military abstention. And above all, CHOCOLATE!! Switzerland, I said, is part of the European continent but interestingly it is not actually a member state of the European Union. It is however a signatory to the European Free Trade Agreement and the European Patent Convention, which latter it subscribes to in association with Liechtenstein, but not part of the European Economic Area. I realised I had lost her as soon as I stopped talking about chocolate. She had already begun making a list of the airport gifts I should return with. Anyway, today I am flying to the land of cuckoo clocks and CHOCOLATE and this is quite exciting. I have finished the obligatory battle with the self-service checkout machine in WH Smith®, this battle without fail involving my boarding card which the machine has to scan so that WH Smith can avoid charging me VAT and instead charge me an Airport Sucker Levy which can be pocketed without telling the tax man. I have finished being scanned for terrorist equipment and this time avoided leaving anything vital like my passport behind with the security guards. I have finished handing over my suitcase to EasyJet® to play rugby with, and again managed to convince them that the suitcase did not contain any instruments of evil, other than some subversive documents about governance and leadership. So now I am sitting around waiting to board and be bored. I have a cheese and pickle sandwich in my bag, but I’m saving it for later. There is not much to enjoy about Bristol airport, so you have to make the good bits last. 14 January 2016, 2 pm
I speak to a nice man from the IPO, to ask if there is anything I need to know about WIPO before I visit them tomorrow. I find it fascinating talking to civil servants. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that whilst patent attorneys might feel very strongly about a particular IP law or procedure, what actually happens at the negotiating table is that concessions have to be made, deals brokered and battles carefully selected to avoid queering the pitch on something important simply to achieve an outcome that the patent attorneys think looks more elegant but the rest of the world isn’t too fussed about. In other words, there is political horse-trading to be done. And then at the eleventh hour, after three days of meetings, one of the 130 hugely diverse delegates will wake up, remember what IP is and stamp his feet in the interests of national sovereignty, ie veto everything agreed so far. Being a person of integrity (as the CIPA Pee has to be), although also one of naivety, I find I have a lot of learning to do in this area. A person of integrity should stick to their principles, and continue to shout about them long after she has been dragged kicking and screaming off her soapbox. CIPA members probably expect me to do this in their interests, if nothing else because they enjoy the spectacle but also because I am there to represent the Good and the Just and the Properly Punctuated. On the other hand, a certain degree of pragmatism is called for, if you actually want to achieve anything. You have to accept that some battles you are never going to win, and some are not worth expending energy on, and that if you stand on the wrong soapbox saying the wrong things for the wrong length of time, then however good your intentions, you are not going to go down as the world’s most influential operator. Which is also, ultimately, of little use to CIPA members and their clients. I guess this is what people call Diplomacy. It has never concerned me before, as anyone who has worked with me will know, especially Mr Davies. And I am not about to become expert at it in the four months I have left as Pee. I will just have to worry my tiny brain about it some other time: right now, there’s a toothbrush to pack. 14 January 2016, 12.15
I finish my packing early (I do not need to take much; I am only going for one night so that’s three cans of Red Bull® and a toothbrush if there’s room), so am able to listen to the live play-back of the Patent Attorneys Are Brilliant pre-record. It is excruciating. My husband sits loyally beside me so we can be excruciated together. He has made himself a cheese and pickle sandwich specially. I had not realised, at the time, how long I’d wittered on for. I hardly drew breath. My husband does not seem in the least surprised about this. I am glad there are so few of us listening: me, my husband, potentially Mr Lampert and six other regular listeners from the Isle of Wight pickle factory. Also of note is that the phone-line sounds as though I am calling from the inside of a stationery cupboard with a very bad cold (that’s me with the cold, not the stationery cupboard). In Mr Davies’s defence, I should point out that he has not yet implemented this particular internal governance model; I was not in the CIPA stationery cupboard counting the number of staples we had left. No, I was in Zummerzet, sharing my home phone line as usual with thirty other Zummerzet households, their PCs, their smartphones, their tablets, their Minecraft® tournaments, their illegal downloads, their online supermarket shopping and their burglar alarm systems. As a result, not only was my telephone connection a little ropey, but whilst I was wittering about Chartered Patent Attorneys being brilliant, three people got killed by zombies, four got burgled by mistake and one managed to order 30 times too many tins of custard. The accidental burglaries didn’t matter because the Zummerzet Police aren’t on the phone anyway. But the extra 29 tins of custard might be a pain. 14 January 2016, 9.15 am
I am being interviewed by BBC Radio Solent. The reason I got this job is that it is a mid-day, mid-life, middle-class magazine programme for folk who are bored of early retirement and can’t afford to go skiing or round-the-world cruising. A magazine programme takes a gentle look at current affairs, and also interprets the term “current affairs” rather loosely. It replays its gentle observations as a background to listeners’ attempts to rustle up a cheese and pickle sandwich. So we are not talking here about a hard-hitting debate on substantive patent law, or on the political and economic impact of global harmonisation, or on the interplay between the UPC and Mr Cameron’s EU referendum. We are talking about what to do if you have a Good Idea while you are eating your cheese and pickle sandwich. Also, let’s face it, this is Radio Solent, not CNN. The Solent is the region where Mr Davies and the EyeEyePeePee live. It is the region they often cannot get out of because even the local train drivers sometimes cannot be bothered to get up in the morning. It is not where world-changing incidents and paradigm shifts tend to come from. Its residents don’t sit down at mid-day, turn on the local radio and think, “This is where the rest of my life begins. I’ll just eat my cheese and pickle sandwich first.” Because I have to go to the airport later today, I am doing a “pre-record”. This is a technical term. It means they get me out of the way early and hope that by mid-day something interesting will have come up instead. It means that the producer can cut out the bits that sound tedious or stupid before Radio Solent unleashes me on the cheese and pickle sandwich-eating public. But I have done Media Training so I know I have to have a key message and also that I must communicate that key message come what may. “Good morning,” says the presenter. She is a very nice lady, but she has just had some traffic problems on the M27 so she is not in a mood to be messed with. “Good morning,” I say cheerfully. “Chartered Patent Attorneys are BRILLIANT!” 12 January 2016, 5.30 pm
And then it is time to meet the Chief Eggseks, and tell them about the pain and frustration of being a President. They do not seem overly sympathetic. Apparently it is quite painful and frustrating being a Chief Eggsek too, because of having to work with Presidents. The discussions become quite competitive: my President was worse than your President; my Council was the most frustrating in the world; well mine was the most frustrating in the universe so there; my Board met once a month for a whole day; well mine met once a month for three days at a time, THREE DAYS, can you imagine that??! For all my explanations about the character traits of a patent attorney, however, even I have to concede that the Chief Eggsek who works with psychologists wins the prize for the hardest job of all. For whilst a Council of patent attorneys will spend half an hour punctuating a set of minutes or construing a strategic objective, a Council of psychologists will be so busy analysing one another’s motives that they will not even realise there is a document to punctuate. I imagine that instead of working through an agenda, they share their feelings about it, and that in many contexts, this might not facilitate progress. The Chief Eggseks then exchange ideas about how to cope with amateur Presidents and meddling volunteers and people who try to govern by taking an obsessive interest in the selection of a new photocopier. I think their ideas are rubbish, largely. It does not sound right to lock your President in a stationery cupboard with an instruction to count the number of staples left. I will explain to Mr Davies that should this happen at CIPA any time soon, there will be Trouble. And possibly a shortage of paper clips. One of the ideas I put on the table, to make Presidents less rubbish, is to pay them a salary. The Chief Eggseks snort in derision at this. You would never get that past your governing Council, they say. Well no, obviously, because I cannot even get a thrice-updated Strategic Plan past CIPA’s governing Council. But perhaps, in a parallel universe somewhere, there might be a governing Council in a membership body that might be prepared to consider the idea. Because if you paid someone, you could require them to put in a decent performance, and not just bumble around getting in the way. But the Chief Eggseks would prefer salaries to be for Chief Eggseks, not Pees. And I guess that is understandable. 12 January 2016, mid-day
And then I must attend a meeting of the Professional Development Working Group. Which is about having lunch, mainly, but also about putting together a fantastic programme of seminars and webinars for CIPA members. Also the lunch is very good, or have I already mentioned that? And then in the afternoon I must sit next to Mr Davies, who has rearranged his office to fit in yet more people, most of whom have taken the opportunity to not be there. I occupy Mr Lampert’s empty desk because it has a better wifi signal than other parts of the room. The downside is the proximity to Mr Davies and his thoughts, which disrupt the wifi anyway. During the afternoon I add loads more tasks to my to-do list, making sure that all of them fall due on another day which I never expect to arrive. I also take one or two tasks off the list, by convincing myself that Mr Davies will pretend to deal with them so that I don’t have to. I am no more confident of Mr Davies’s ability to progress something on a task list than I am of my own, but that, I guess, is how delegation works. 12 January 2016, 9 am
But before I do my talk, I must do some cleaning at the flat. I arrive especially early, because I am out of practice on the domestic goddess front, having spent Christmas in bed being pathetic, so I may need time to acclimatise. First I discover a vacuum thingy, which is for making the carpet flatter, and also for pushing the fluff and manky bits into corners so that nobody sees them any more, except people who like looking in corners, who deserve all they get. Then I discover a cloth thingy and a pretty-smelling squirty bottle, which you can use together to make your surfaces smell pretty, only not the carpeted surfaces or the ones inside drinking vessels – for these there is another squirty bottle labelled Washing-Up Liquid. So I flatten the carpet and push fluff around for a bit, until I am bored of it and the vacuum thingy’s flex won’t reach any further. Then I wave the cloth thingy around in the bathroom until everything is wet, at which point I figure it must be clean. Finally, I empty the rubbish from a first rubbish-receiving receptacle means into a second rubbish-receiving receptacle means, said second rubbish-receiving receptacle means being hidden under the sink so that you don’t have to worry about it any more. In the middle of the night, the Pixies will collect everything from the second, hidden rubbish-receiving receptacle means and take it somewhere else. I think. This, I tell myself, is a good morning’s work. Maybe I was not out of practice after all. 11 January 2016
Tomorrow I must do my talk to the Chief Eggseks. I will be the only Pee in the room and I will be talking to the Chief Eggseks about what it is like to be a Pee in a membership body and how it can go so badly wrong that you end up being unable even to get a Strategic Plan past the nitpicking stage. One key difference between a Chief Eggsek and a Pee is that a Chief Eggsek knows how to run an organisation properly and a Pee does not. Another key difference, which is linked to the first one, is that a Chief Eggsek is paid to run an organisation properly, whereas a Pee is not. To be fair, it is probably reasonable not to be paid for doing something you hope you’ll pick up as you go along, although that doesn’t seem to apply to politicians. What I would like to find out from the Chief Eggseks is how difficult it is when people like me bumble around putting spanners in the works and sending emails full of mad ideas, when you are actually just trying to keep the organisation in one piece. Also, what you should do if you have a disruptive CEO and a disruptive Pee at the same time. And which of them should be the more ruthless dictator, or whether there is a way of sharing ruthlessness so that no one loses out. I have decided I will not after all be talking to them about Leadership. No sir; definitely not. Because we do not need Leadership at CIPA. We have a Charter and some recently de-bollocked Bye-laws, and we have 26 good Council members and true, and that is plenty to be going on with. 9 January 2016
Yesterday the government pronounced to its loyal and obedient subjects that there is no longer any safe way to drink alcohol. I assume this means that all government hospitality, state banquets, etc will now be alcohol-free, and that the Loyal Toast will be raised with glasses of fizzy pop. I have chosen to adopt a pragmatic response to this guidance. To wit: there is also no safe way of travelling by plane, or indeed of crossing the road, but some things you just have to grit your teeth and get on with. I grit my teeth manfully and open a bottle of gin. It is nerve-racking, doing something this unsafe, but the contents make me feel better. I suppose it depends how you define “safe”. In any case, as CIPA President I have plenty of people looking out for me to ensure I don’t do the wrong thing. Council watches my every move, as does the Internal Governance Committee. I hardly need the government on my back as well. |
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