6 March 2017, 2 pm
The invigilators waft about the super-comfortable, climate-controlled exam hall being important and invigilant and making sure the candidates do not attempt to set up discussion forums in their toilet breaks. It is tedious in the extreme being an invigilator. There is only so much you can be invigilant about when nobody cheats and nobody needs spare paper and nobody runs weeping from the room. The EyeEyeEyePeePee looks lost without an excuse to use his thermometer. There is a Chief Invigilator, sent over specially by the EPO to make sure the amateurs, like me for instance, do not make a hash of things. He gets to sit at a desk on a stage, so that he can survey the entire room and everything that is not happening there. After a short time he gets so bored he leaves the room, not to be seen again for some two hours or so. I manage to find myself an at least semi-interesting job checking the candidates’ ID during the first half hour. As if turning up at an exam hall with a suitcase full of text books and a willingness to sit at a desk for five hours were not proof enough that these are genuine candidates. Suffice to say, I do not identify any imposters, although I have to admit there are some dodgy-looking passport photos. Really, they should forge something more flattering next time they want to sit an exam.
0 Comments
6 March 2017, 11 am
I emerge from the whisky fug and spend most of the day being an invigilator with the Onssek, the EyeEyeEyePeePee and the bits of Mr Davies that the whisky left behind, which are primarily the glassy eyes and the leaden feet. This year’s EQEs are being held at the Walsall FC stadium. As if last year’s horrendous experience at Bristol City’s stadium was not sufficient to put us off mixing The Beautiful Game with The Beautiful Qualifying Exams ever again. Today it is the pre-exam. The candidates arrive wearing numerous layers of extreme-weather, 30-tog clothing, prepared for the arctic conditions which their predecessors endured in Bristol. In Bristol, I gather, the heating had to be turned off to prevent the electrics from exploding, and temperatures plummeted to a level at which if you didn’t keep writing, you were at risk of losing your fingers. Luckily the EyeEyeEyePeePee, or the EyeEyePeePee as he was then, was one of the invigilators and, being a practical kind of man, had a thermometer to hand. Not that the thermometer either raised the temperature or fixed the electrics, but it did enable the gathering of proper quantitative data, sufficient to send to the EPO by way of Documentary Evidence, which they immediately deemed late-filed and exercised their discretion to ignore. But I digress. Walsall FC, unlike Bristol City, have heating, lighting and electricity, not to mention a kiosk selling bacon butties. We are made to feel most comfortable. The numerous layers of clothing are tossed aside and several candidates will be completing their exam papers in nothing more than their thermal underwear. I imagine that Walsall FC must be in a different division to Bristol City, although I do not profess to be an expert in such things. Just before noon, a deathly hush descends on the packed hall. I feel a sense of foreboding, like a snail approaching a salt pot. Nothing on earth would entice me back to sit an EQE exam, I think. I can remember almost nothing of the original experience, or indeed of the knowledge I supposedly acquired in preparation. And yet the evidence suggests that I did at one point sit these exams. I am guessing my brain conducted some kind of post-traumatic wipe-out, which turned out to be so effective it lasted my whole career. 5 March 2017
After two weeks of running the domestics while my husband goes out bread winning, I have escaped. The fact that I have only managed to escape as far as a train to Walsall is neither here nor there. The fact that when I get to Walsall, all I have to look forward to is invigilating for the EQEs, is also not important. What is important is that for four whole days, I am not responsible for putting meals on the table or for the table being clean enough to put them on. I am a Free Spirit. I have left instructions on How to Cope Without Me, but surprisingly enough, nobody seemed that interested. They will cope perfectly well without me, just like they coped when I spent a year being the CIPA Pee. They will hardly notice I’m gone, in fact. But far from being offended by this, I regard it as a successful outcome. It is Strategic Dispensibility. It means that I can come and go as I please – yes, even to Walsall – and nobody will mind. On arrival at my hotel, I repair to the bar to find the Onssek, the EyeEyeEyePeePee and Mr Davies, who are also here for the invigilating, so you can tell how popular it is. Mr Davies was hoping to leave the bar before I arrived, on account of whenever he and I are in a bar together a lot of whisky gets drunk, and often we get drunk too. But he left it too late and now look, here we all are drinking Talisker®. *Sigh.* I have been thinking more about the Mental Health Awareness Week events and I have decided to put down some thoughts, in preparation, about my own brushes with mental illness. From my vast experience in the patent profession thus far, not to mention having a fastening means or two loose myself, here are what I see as the most common problems:
1 March 2017
Over the last few weeks, in addition to removing sock fluff from webinar scripts and remembering about further processing, I have been attempting to organise some events. Organising events is what I do best, it seems. Other people turn up to my events to be erudite and entertaining speakers, and to be erudite and entertained audience members, and my job is simply to make sure they all arrive at the same place and the same time and that there is something for them to drink when they do. So, I have been organising the next EPO proceedings course, and a mock hearing, and a seminar on recruitment best practices, and several discussion events for Mental Health Awareness Week. I have been organising a meeting of the IP Inclusive steering committee, which is supposed to be steering the diversity initiative into a properly structured something-or-other, so long as it can agree its own structure first. I have made a start on a launch party for the new Careers in Ideas website. And I have helped to plan a Women in IP webinar. It is true that for some of these events, my organisational input extends no further than begging someone else to do it all for me. Ms Sear would call this Delegation, of course, but that is because Ms Sear draws up proper Project Plans and so is qualified to delegate; I am not qualified to delegate because most of the time I do not even know what it is I am delegating let alone when I need it done by. Also Ms Sear does not weep and sniffle while she delegates, which I think is a bit of a giveaway, smacking more of desperation than of management. Nevertheless, there are events being organised, some thanks to me, and some thanks to the people who could not stand the weeping and sniffling any more. And the net result is that my inbox is constantly full. Which is a bit of a challenge, now that my husband is back at work and I am in sole charge of Domesticity Management. The Domesticity Management is also the source of much weeping and sniffling, only there is no one around to hear it. The Women in IP webinar is most definitely being organised by other people. This is good. Or rather, it would be good, except that what the other people have organised is for me to co-chair it. So amongst other things, I am going to have to read up about Being a Workplace Ally. I suspect that Being a Workplace Ally is not something that will ever come naturally to someone like me, so there may need to be some bluffing involved. And sock fluff, of course: that goes without saying. The Mental Health Awareness Week events are also being organised by other people. This is good too. And important, because mental health is a major issue in a profession like ours. I defy anyone to be a patent attorney without suffering from at least some kind of mental health problem. It is not natural to have a to-do list that extends to Christmas 2021. And it is certainly not natural to have to think about concepts such as poisonous priorities and the problem and solution approach. For most of us, weeping and sniffling is part of the job description. I would not be surprised if some attorneys had a separate hourly rate for it. 28 February 2017
I am working on some webinar scripts for the patent administrators’ course. It is taking me a while because my brain has gone rusty, but I am sticking at it. I am not a quitter, no sir. Ms Sear is in charge, and Ms Sear wants no truck with quitters. When I have finished the scripts, which will likely be in about 2019, I will have to go to CIPA and record them. There are webinars already, and they are good, but Ms Sear prefers to have a proper written script so that she can tell me off when I say the wrong thing or add in lots of waffle and sock fluff. Ms Sear wants no truck with sock fluff either, because it messes up her Learning Outcomes. So what I am doing is I am listening to last year’s webinars, and working from a transcript that somebody unrelated to the IP world typed up in a state of catatonic boredom, and turning it into a spanking new script that even I cannot get wrong when I get into the recording studio. In the two weeks I have been working on this project, I have acquired an awful lot of new knowledge. This is because my old knowledge did not quite extend to the complexities of the patent administrator’s role, being confined instead to the stuff that patent attorneys can cope with. So my research has taken me to EPO and WIPO websites, looking at forms I have not seen in a long time and not known how to fill out for even longer, because there has always been a friendly administrator prepared to do it for me. I am shocked to see that the forms have changed since I last signed one, which is inconsiderate. This must have happened while we were too busy worrying about Brexit and the United States of Trump to be looking where we were going. Anyway, I am so going to log my webinar writing as CPD time. Because after three years away from the patent coal face, I had almost forgotten about further processing, and now I have remembered, and so my life is complete again. My professional credibility, if not intact, is now marginally less crumbly than it was during my presidency. 12 February 2017
My niece has recently become a Teenager, so I take her on a celebratory shopping trip. I take my seventeen-year-old daughter with me too, for protection, and also my sister, who is nominally in charge of the new Teenager. When I was this age, I would have been happy enough with a trip to W H Smith® for a 30-pack of felt pens. These days teenagers demand a little more effort from their relatives, and we establish early on that felt pens are not going to suffice. A great deal of makeup is purchased. Over-priced junk food is consumed, followed by over-priced vitality-enhancing superfood gunk drinks. We also visit a shop where a lady called Victoria has discovered the Secret of how to fleece females of all generations, by persuading them to enhance their assets with over-priced snippets of lace. My sister and I are old and wise enough to see through the snippets of lace, both literally and metaphorically. They are inadequate in size, lacking in mechanical strength, and inappropriately positioned with respect to their supporting structures. The teenagers are, however, still young and optimistic enough to believe that their own bodies will transcend the usual demands of physics and be absolutely fine in Victoria’s garments. Another teenager, who is employed by Victoria to go around making customers feel optimistic, shows us little cupboards and drawers full of skimpiness, where we can choose yet more snippets of lace, padding and wire reinforcement to help us transcend the laws of physics. These things are unpatentable! I want to shout. They are insufficient! Instead I thank the employee for her help and scuttle into the shadows to weep. Since various parts of my body are now themselves inappropriately positioned with respect to their supporting structures, I suspect no amount of padding and wire reinforcement is going to turn me into the kind of Secret that Victoria wants to reveal to the world. My niece reminds me that my role here is not to question the purchases. I am here as the Chief Financial Officer, because (a) I have a credit card and (b) I can subtract. The subtraction part is important, because I have imposed a Spending Limit, and the niece is apparently not good enough at maths to be sure when she has accidentally exceeded it by a lot. How convenient. 9 February 2017, 6 pm
My husband has been offered a job. We take the children out for tea, to celebrate but also to explain to them how things are going to work under our new domestic arrangements. Chief among the new arrangements will be that the new person in charge of home and family – ie me – has zero tolerance for things of this nature, no aptitude at all on the nurturing front and a very low boredom threshold. Thus, going forward, all team members will be expected to take ownership of their own projects, for example the Personal Laundry Project and the Bedroom Floor Rationalisation Programme. The Nutrition Facilitation Department will also be closed until further notice. PE kits will no longer be self-assembling. The children look sceptical. And also a little puzzled by the references to dusters and toilet ducks and such like. Never mind, say my husband and I as we sit back with our celebratory alcoholic drinks. It will be Team Work. It will be Fun. Can you afford a decent car now? asks the twelve-year-old. He means a Tesla®. We say no, we cannot afford a Tesla®. I can tell my son is about to ask why I do not go back to work as well then, since I am clearly going to be no use as a Welcome Home deputation. But something in my face, viewed through a glass of gin and tonic, tells him this is not the right moment to ask. We agree that for the next few years, until my husband has got bored of going out to work every day, we will get an online shopping app and survive on microwavable ready meals. 9 February 2017, 5 pm
But then, just when I am feeling fed up and personally responsible for Brexit, I get the nicest email ever. It says that IP Inclusive, even though it is informal and untransparent and unaccountable, is going to win an award for namby-pambiness. The proper title of the award is “Corporate Social Responsibility”. Although we have already established that there is nothing responsible about IP Inclusive, or its leader. I am invited to a posh gala dinner to collect the award. Yay! This means a new posh frock! I need a new one because the old ones are designed for a figure I have not got any more and possibly did not have at the time I bought them either but they looked nice on the mannequin. I am supposed to keep this all hush-hush because it is like the Oscars and no one is supposed to know the lucky winners in advance. So I shall probably have to shoot myself for writing about it in my Secret Diary. But in any case, it is going to be no secret once I turn up at the posh ceremony, because everyone will know I am not there to collect any of the other awards, for instance for being a great patent attorneyette or a hot-shot IP lawyer. I shall have to tell my family, anyway, to explain the new frocks which will be arriving by courier over the next few weeks. 9 February 2017, 3 pm
I dial in to a meeting of senior CIPA and CITMA people. They are all in bad moods because of Brexit. Then they are in even worse moods because they cannot agree whether firms of dual-qualified attorneys should call themselves Chartered Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys or Chartered Trade Mark and Patent Attorneys or Trade and Patent Mark Chartered Attorneys or simply Miscellaneous IP Attorneys. By the time we get to discussing IP Inclusive, everyone is keen to go home. They are not hugely impressed with my latest namby-pamby idea for creating a more formal and transparent and accountable structure, because they have spotted that at the end of the idea, there will still be a mad woman in charge. “But I do not have the time to set up a limited company,” I protest, “and nor do you.” “Ah,” they say, “but we know a man who does.” I am always deeply suspicious of people that know men who do. Usually it turns out that the man who does has no intention of doing it. In any case, I suspect that in this context, the man who does is probably a psychiatrist. I am fed up of people being grumpy with me. It is not my fault about Brexit. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |