2 June 2015, 10 am
I pop down to CIPA HQ for some meetings. One is about litigation and another is about unitary patent renewal fees. From these, I learn three things: firstly, I know nothing about litigation or unitary patent renewal fees. Secondly, there are people who do. Thirdly, if you keep your mouth shut, the people who know things will tell you what to do next, and all you have to do is nod. There is also a meeting with Ms Sear and this is not so easy to bluff my way through because Ms Sear’s meetings always have to lead to Learning Outcomes. It is a lunchtime meeting so I try to pretend that I am busy eating my Learning Outcomes, but Ms Sear is smarter than that. She gives me lots of advice about managing people, which I also eat – the advice, I mean, not the people. Ms Sear says that you have to manage people by talking to them and helping them to develop and other namby-pamby jiggery-pokery. She says that if you share a room with people, then you must ask everyone what annoys them about the other people in the room, so that you can all try to annoy one another less. Or if not that, then at least you can all gang up on the one who annoys everyone the most. This takes me by surprise, because I had thought that when you shared a room with people, the whole point was to annoy them as much as possible so that eventually you got given an office of your own, or even better, they all left and you got automatic promotion. These days I share a room with Mr Davies and Unlucky Gary and Rebecca-who-writes-our-policy-documents, having pinched Mr Lampert’s desk during the week he was stupid enough to go on holiday. Unlucky Gary sighs a lot and Mr Davies swears a lot and when he isn’t swearing he shouts mad ideas across the room with many decibels of Misplaced Enthusiasm and we are all supposed to catch them and run with them (which is management-speak for turning them into a project plan). I wonder what they would say annoyed them about me. Apart from the straw and the Red Bull® fumes, obviously. Rebecca has not been at CIPA long, but already she has made a heroic stab at putting into writing the thousands of years of jumbled thoughts that have been emanating from our erudite committees and clogging up the CIPA stationery cupboard. So perhaps she is best described as our Chief Writey Person. Rebecca does not do anything annoying, as far as I can tell, so I am beginning to wonder how she ever got a job at CIPA.
0 Comments
|
Archives
July 2019
Categories |