28 September 2017, 8 am
It is the day of the Grand CIPA Congress. I arrive bright and early because I am going to be manning an IP Inclusive stand in the exhibition hall. The IP Inclusive stand consists of two spanking new pop-up banners we have had made (one for IP Inclusive and one for Careers in Ideas), some handouts, what is known as a “poseur table”, my good friend Ms Evans, and me. A “poseur table” is a tiny round table on a stick, which is just the right height for a confident male to stand posing at, but just too tall for me to see over the top of. Ms Evans, who is taller than me, reliably informs me that the handouts are on top of the poseur table, but I am unable to verify this for myself. I do not make a very good poseur. I am wishing I could have a proper table like the other exhibitors, but clearly I am not important enough for that. In between bouts of stand-manning and posing, I pop in and out of the Congress sessions in order to accrue a little more CPD, albeit in ten-minute chunks. Congress is very busy, and there is only just room for me to stand at the side of the room to listen to the speakers. This means that throughout the course of the day, I do quite a bit of standing around posing and very little sitting. When Ms Evans has had enough of the man-standing and posing, she asks the venue staff to bring us a couple of chairs. The chairs do not arrive quickly enough so then Ms Evans goes into her Scary Lady routine and threatens to wrap the poseur table around the head waiter’s neck, and after that two chairs arrive pretty promptly, by which time I am too exhausted to do anything much but sink into one of them. Luckily there is no such thing as a poseur chair. I do take a break from the posing at one point, to give a talk to the parallel administrators’ conference. This is a conference running in parallel, not a conference full of administrators arranged in equidistant lines. Mr Davies, who is MC-ing the parallel conference for some reason, is ready on the stage to introduce me. He is wearing comedy white shoes and a comedy white bow-tie, and wielding a Gandalf-style stick. He makes the poseur table look positively dowdy. He introduces me and I step up to the lectern to tell people about how to write better letters. Ten minutes later, half of the wall hangings fall down on the far side of the room, and after that nobody listens to me anymore. I now appreciate how Theresa May felt when her slogans started coming down around her at the Tory Party Conference. I know a lot about letter writing, me. In my job I have had to read many, many awful letters, some written by opponents, some by patent office staff who might just as well be opponents, some by my own dear colleagues, and some even by myself. They have been tedious, turgid, often unclear, and usually designed to leave the reader incensed. Afterwards, someone from the audience asks me: At what point did you get the courage to dispense with rubbishy waffly bits like “I write in connection with the abovementioned patent application and further to our recent correspondence in respect of this matter”? I say I cannot remember; possibly it was shortly after another patent attorney told me my letters were so full of rubbishy waffle she could not even be bothered to take a red pen to them. You know things are bad when a patent attorney stops enjoying her red pen.
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