I do love the student induction day. The new recruits are always so enthusiastic,
so full of the stuffing they have not yet had knocked out of them.
But I shouldn’t talk about stuffing this close to
Thanksgiving.
This year we are treating the students to our
spangly new-format afternoon session.
Instead of allowing them to snooze through my immensely fascinating talk
on How to Write a Good Business Letter (which no-one needs to know now anyway
because FYI no-one writes letters any more OMG DYNKT?), we allow them to talk
amongst themselves for forty minutes about what they might want from CIPA if
they cared enough to be bothered. During
these forty minutes I wander around facilitating the discussions, which means
handing out sweets. Then we all gather
round Mr Davies and his flip chart and he writes down the students’
suggestions. Soon the flip chart looks
better than our Strategic Plan.
So this is what the students want from CIPA:
- Mentors. This is an optimistic idea, I
suspect. Patent attorneys are not
naturally the nurturing sort.
- Collated information about IP attorney firms, both for
potential recruits and for potential clients. Forgive me, but in order to collate data
don’t you need a proper database?
So that one’s dead in the water until we get our whizzy new CRM
system.
- More social events, such
as a CIPA sports day or a CIPA University Challenge attempt. Can you imagine what patent attorneys
would be like on University Challenge?
They would spend most of their time construing the questions. No, that would not work at all. But a sports day…hmmm… jousting
tournament, anyone?
- A fireman’s pole leading
directly from the third floor to the hostelry below. Now
you’re talking! We could use it to
transport Council members straight from their monthly meetings to the
monthly happy hours. To make sure
they had all arrived safely we could do a Trumpton-style roll call at the
bottom: Vee-Pee, EyePeePee, Onssek,
Eggsek, Peeee!!
To round off the afternoon, we interview Mr Heap from
IPReg. Mr Davies pretends to be Michael
Parkinson and asks Mr Heap some deep and meaningful questions like What is regulation? and Why?
We have given Mr Davies a script to work from, but it bothers him not
one jot.
While all this is going on, there are also some exciting
events unfolding, which require the Officers to drop everything and make
momentous decisions and stuff. I have
great fun going into the room where the students are milling, and then excusing
myself to go through the firmly closed Door of Importance (which is the door to
Mr Davies’s room), and back out to the students, and back in through the Door
of Importance again, just so they are in no doubt about my exalted status. I am not actually doing anything to help
behind the Door of Importance, other than to tell the Officers that the
students are still there. But people
seem to cope without me on both sides so I figure my skills are probably
best put to use opening and shutting the Door of Importance in order to impart
a sense of gravitas to the proceedings.
We need more gravitas.
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