12 November 2015, 4.30 pm
Actually, forget what I said about the cybercrime talk being the scariest one. The scariest one is me standing in for Mr Davies to give an update about CIPA’s activities. Mr Davies was also caught up in the train chaos and so I am a last-minute substitution. I am the ideal person for this because I am almost as good as Mr Davies at waffling for hours about things I can only vaguely remember happening. I tell the audience what I can see from the crow’s nest of The Good Ship CIPA. This is not always the same as what other people can see from the crow’s nest, although to be fair there are not many CIPA folk prepared to venture up there at all. I explain that I can see land ahoy and I tell people how we are planning ahead to make the most of the opportunities we find there. I say I can also see pirates ahoy and this is what CIPA is planning to do about them. I say there are The Rocks of Referendum and there is Das Gute Schiff Rumtopf, not to mention an IPReg patrol boat called The Happy Heap that is looking for incompetent patent attorneys who’ve drunk too much overproof rum. At the end of the talk I ask if anyone has any questions. It is five minutes to happy hour: of course no one has any questions. The audience has little understanding of, let alone interest in, what I have just been saying: they know there are not really pirates and that IPReg doesn’t actually have a patrol boat. However, a quick show of hands (at one minute to happy hour) reveals that they trust CIPA to get on with it and not bother them any further. I’ll bet they do. What a great way of gathering feedback! 12 November 2015, 7 pm In order to save CIPA money, I took the Park & Ride into Cardiff. Now, after happy hour, I must locate the right bus stop to get back to my car before it’s impounded for the night. It is not easy, working out where to catch a Park & Ride bus. I decide to ask the nice ticket desk people at Cardiff Queen Street station. They will know, because they work in Cardiff. But it turns out they do not know. In the course of a most bizarre conversation, I find that they have no idea what I mean by “Park & Ride”, much less that Cardiff has one. We only do trains here, they say. Yes, thank you, I got that. But I thought you might at least have heard of buses. Eventually I find the right bus stop, and some considerable time later the right bus. It is full of weary-looking Christmas shoppers. The South Wales Cyber Cluster has obviously put them off shopping online.
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