27 October 2015, 10 am
I have put a lot of time and effort into CIPA work over the last eighteen months. I have spent many nights away from home, and many hours packing and travelling and unpacking again. I have attended countless meetings and answered thousands of emails, most of them politely. I have worked hard to progress initiatives that many Council members had not the slightest interest in helping me with, because – as one of them once explained to me – they have proper jobs to do. And I have incurred plenty of costs that I have never thought to reclaim, for example the plastic-potted food that I have to buy for my sad person meals in the London flat; and cleaning materials (because when you borrow a friend’s flat, to avoid the cost of a hotel room, you have to clean it and change the bedding and do the washing); not to mention a dry cleaning bill to make my eyes water. And because I do not have a proper job, these extra expenses do actually matter. You can see, then, why I am cross about being criticised for taking the initiative, over a trip to build relationships with senior USPTO officials and AIPLA representatives. A trip that took me away from home for six nights, just days after another set of meetings had kept me away for three nights. In fact, the more I think about the criticism, the crosser I get. So I have decided: I will go on strike. I will not do any CIPA work at all for a while. I will cancel the meetings and ignore the emails, and stay at home where I can eat cheap casseroles with the family and get the kids to help with the cleaning. I will wear jeans all day, because jeans do not need dry cleaning, and I will refuse to spend my evenings packing suitcases and my mornings driving up the M5 in the dark before anyone else is awake. So there! 27 October 2015, 11 am OK, so there is a flaw in my plan. A large number of the meetings and teleconferences in my diary, and of the emails I need to answer, involve some genuinely nice, helpful, hard-working volunteers who have also sacrificed much for the CIPA cause, and whom I will let down if I go on strike. How can I possibly do that? 27 October 2015, 9 pm I have just watched the film Suffragette, and I have decided that instead of going on strike (which makes life difficult for the good people), I will just become extra-specially militant. Though I can’t quite see myself jumping under a horse, I am taken with the idea of storming a Council meeting with slogans and placards, or dropping parcels of dynamite into committee meetings. I could wear outrageous clothes, and say outrageous things just when people were expecting me to, er – well anyway. There is an argument that people only elected me because they thought I might shake things up a bit. I am thinking, if my role as Pee is going to be difficult and miserable, I may as well do some fun things now and then to compensate.
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