At some point during the Christmas lunch, it occurs to me
that the CIPA people are my new Bestest Friends. Bester even than the Dutch Apple Cake
Pixies. Almost as bestest, in fact, as
the people at my day job, who put up with me swanning in and out to nick paper
clips, and are therefore my Firstest Bestest Friends.
Let me introduce you.
First there is Amazing Dwaine, who organised this whole event so as to
take his mind off the fact that his partner is about to have their second
baby. Dwaine plays football, or rather,
Dwaine used to play football until one day he played it so hard he injured his
leg. He is going to have an operation to
make his leg footballable again, and conveniently for all concerned the
operation is also round about the time the baby is due.
Then there is Fantastic Fran, who has been at CIPA for
longer than is sensible. And there is
Spreadsheet Spurgeon, who has been at CIPA for longer than is healthy. Spurgeon looks after the accounts and can
remember the days when the budget was done on an abacus and the salaries on a
slide rule (pre-2010 I think), so you can see why he might enjoy
spreadsheets. Fran can remember the days
when the library was full of earnest patent agents combing back-issues of the
RPCs for typos, and the cupboards were full of past presidents and their
cufflinks. These days she and Amazing
Dwaine put together newsletters and things for the student members. In the old days no-one even knew we had
student members.
Amiable Iain is there to run the Journal, because it is all very well having an Editor mincing
around shouting Dahlings! Hold the front page! but there has to be someone who
can turn all the waffling and shouting into a document and get it to the
printers. Iain has not quite been at
CIPA long enough to remember the days when the Journal was stitched together by hand and delivered in brown paper
packages together with a little something for the weekend.
Iain is helped by Crispin, who is a stand-up comedian in his
spare time. I imagine he is never short
of material. Spreadsheet Spurgeon is
helped by Andrew, who is not a stand-up comedian but who has the look of
someone who would like to be. Andrew is
keen on football, but not enough to injure himself doing it like Dwaine does.
In a special lair full of unpatentable subject matter, Byte-Sized
Bill sorts out the Institute’s IT systems.
Every now and then he emerges with some tangled wires, and we are never
sure whether these wires were crucial to the IT systems and Bill has only just
discovered them, or whether they are superfluous to the IT systems and Bill has
decided to throw them out, like he threw out some bits of the database the
other day. No-one dares ask and Bill
never tells us. He is an Unpatentable
Enigma.
Charlene and Kirsty and Lisa work in the Membership Team,
alongside Fran, Dwaine, Iain, Crispin and the cuddly dinosaur. It is their job to make things happen for
CIPA members. So when naïve idiots like
me say Dahlings! Let’s do a seminar!
it is their job to find a venue and a buffet and some seats, on a budget of £5 a
head, and to untangle the bookings from the bird’s nest that is the CIPA
website. They make name badges and print
programmes and chase speakers for slides and biographies, which some speakers
seem to regard as an affront if it happens more than 24 hours before the event,
but Charlene and Kirsty and Lisa are patient people and they have plenty of
biscuits to eat while they wait.
Alice the Welcome works on reception. She has a very smiley face, which is great
for lulling visitors into a false sense of security, before we show them into
the mausoleum I mean library and turn the heating off. Ms Sear, our Head of Education, also has a
smiley face but you have to earn it, and normally most things that an average
person might do will be nowhere near sufficient to earn it because Ms Sear has
very high standards. She wants
everything to have a Learning Outcome and she has a way of making it clear that
it is you who is supposed to be doing the learning. Angelina and Rebecca are her bodyguards and
they have some spare Learning Outcomes for people who have forgotten to bring
their own. They also know a lot about
examinations and training courses and they can do project management before you
even know you have a project.
Then there is Mr Lampert, our Chief Shouty Person. Mr Lampert joined CIPA in the summer and he
still looks a little bit shocked when he comes into the office of a morning. This is because he has a desk next to Mr
Davies and of the two of them, Mr Lampert is definitely not the most
shouty. He is in charge of the whizzy
new e-newsletter and is about to publish a special Christmas edition containing
seven whole typos as a treat for patent attorneys to spot: there will be a
prize for the person who writes in about them first.
Unlucky Gary looks after Mr Davies’s brain. He keeps it in a desk drawer under a pile of
Post-Its® with swear-words on them, which he holds up as prompts when Mr Davies
is on the phone to people. Mr Davies
does not like being prompted, though; it is a drain on his creative
energies. He prefers to ad-lib his
swear-words.
Mr Davies himself is the Chief Eggsek. He is supposed to do as he is told by
Council. Unfortunately no-one spotted,
when they recruited him, that he has a website called disruptiveceo.com. This was
a massive clue but it got past even the most eagle-eyed of the sober-suited
ones. So now Mr Davies is the
irresistibly disruptive force to Council’s immovably conservative object, and
Unlucky Gary has to pick up the pieces.
Unlucky Gary was called Unlucky Gary even before he joined
CIPA. Now he is thinking of changing his
name to Doomed Gary.
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