Sunday 8 March 2015

Consensi

4 February 2015

I attend today’s meetings by phone, on account of still having to eat everything through a straw and my face being swollen up like a replete hamster’s. 

The Council meeting is a grumpy one.  It is also a long one.  And the longer it goes on, the grumpier it gets.  I put my phone on mute so as not to subject my colleagues to the sound of me slurping my soup through a straw.  It doesn’t help my mood that during the meeting I manage to consume two bowls’ worth of soup and I still feel hungry.

In fact, my optimism-that-knows-no-bounds has all of a sudden found bounds in abundance.

At the end of all the grumpiness it is declared that we have reached one or two consensi (this being the plural of consensus, obviously).  I was not aware we had reached any consensi.  But sometimes if people talk loudly enough and longly enough the other people stop joining in and I guess at that point we might be deemed to have sort-of consensually reached an endpoint.

One of the better consensi is that the new Education & Professional Standards Committee is good to go, although Council is a little uncomfortable with the idea of it having a “vision” so has insisted that the “vision” be provisional, just to be on the safe side.  How a vision could be anything other than provisional I’m not entirely sure, it being one of the least tangible of all the intangible assets we work with and not even registrable at that.  However, I guess our concerns are due to having been trained to keep our main claims broad until such time as the client has decided what it is he’s invented this week.

Another good consensus results in our almost having a couple of CIPA Policy Papers.  We have waited years to have Policy Papers of our own – normally we have to crib from someone else’s by reading over their shoulder – and now suddenly we have two of them at once.  Someone makes a comment linking this to the arrival of buses, but believe me in Zummerzet you never ever get two buses arriving at once.  You are lucky to get half a bus clamped to the front end of a tractor.  And even luckier if it is pointing in the right direction.

No comments:

Post a Comment