I set off for a conference, with the EyePeePee. On the way there he tells me a riveting story. By this I mean he tells me how he spent his
weekend putting rivets in bits of trains to join them to other bits of
trains. Apparently there are two types
of rivets (yeah, yeah) and it took a lot of blokes to get them to the right
temperature and smack them into the right places. And the EyePeePee had a Very Important Job
(yeah, yeah), which as far as I can tell was to crawl under the train to pick
up the rivets that the other blokes had dropped. But maybe I misunderstood that bit: there are
a lot of roads to cross on the way and I am busy worrying that the EyePeePee,
who by now has the look of a Seriously Possessed Enthusiast about him, does not
absent-mindedly stray into them. He tells me he is very tired and he does
indeed look a bit sooty still behind the ears.
I accidentally follow the EyePeePee straight into a meeting
with the conference panellists. I
realise I have made a massive faux-pas because I am not a panellist and I know
nothing about the subject they are discussing, but it is too late to back out. I will just have to blag it. Again.
The panellists are European Commissioners and professors and
eminent QCs. At first I think I have
managed to fool them, because I know that this is how it works at CIPA and
indeed in most businesses: if you turn up to a meeting people will assume you
are meant to be there and listen to what you say even if you know nothing. But the head of this meeting is one Right
Honourable Professor Sir Robin Jacob and I realise he is not the type of man
you could fool into crawling under a train to pick up other blokes’ rivets. Professor Sir Robin suggests we go round the
table and introduce ourselves. I succumb
to a seasonal coughing fit.
The conference is all about trade secrets. The biggest secret about trade secrets is
that nobody actually has any. Everybody
pretends to have them, though, so as not to be thought the only business in the
world that Has No Trade Secrets. It is
easy to pretend to have trade secrets because, dur, they are secrets so you
cannot tell anyone what they are, not even your staff who might pass them on to
their friends, or your lawyers, whose IT systems are so unsophisticated they
could be hacked into with nail clippers.
Nobody must ever know our
trade secrets, you can say; they are extremely hush-hush and Need-to-Know. But our Cyber Security Consultants, bless
them, have constructed a fantastic seventeen-layer Virtual Security Ring-fence
around our trade secrets to keep them safe and that is why you can no longer
exchange emails with your line manager without causing a Priority One Red-Grade
Lock-Down.
The conference is held in a secret deep-security basement
which is kept nice and warm so as to incubate the seasonal coughing fit germs
we have brought in with us. It is 4 pm,
approximately 12 hours after I got up this morning, and the warmth has the
inevitable effect on my brain cells, which also go into a Priority One
Red-Grade Lock-Down. I hear the European
Commissioner telling us why we need EU legislation on trade secrets that nobody
actually has, and I hear the audience telling him that the English would have
written the legislation better, but I’m not sure I hear all the bits in between.
No comments:
Post a Comment