ndrosen

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is part of the Department of Commerce, and Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, is or has been an inventor in the field of business methods. The name seemed familiar, so I did a little searching, and confirmed that I was the examiner for three patents with his name on them: U.S. Patent 6,850,907, U.S. Patent 6,963,856, and U.S. Patent 8,209,249. I don’t recall interacting with Mr. Lutnick personally, although I could have done so. Examining the applications would probably have involved written communications with a patent attorney, and perhaps a telephone or in-person interview with an attorney. Anyway, this may be of a little interest.

I have been a part-time teleworker for the past couple of years, but then Donald Trump issued an executive order basically banning teleworking, the brass at the USPTO sent an email telling us not to telework, and the president of the Patent Office Professional Association sent an email saying that we have a contract which provides for teleworking, so the order does not apply to covered employees. I don’t want to be a test case, so I’ve been coming in to the office each day this week to work. There may be further developments.

And now, I will catch a bus, and go in to work.

Early Wednesday afternoon, there was a Bring Your Own Mug event at the Patent and Trademark Office, an opportunity for a little socializing (I still put in enough hours actually working). I brought my Henry George mug, which I filled with mint tea, and chatted a couple of people. I wandered around the room, and saw a man I hadn’t met before, with a mug that had “Nihilist” crossed out, and “Thomist” written above it. I did not at first see the whole message, which was “Hillbilly Thomist”. This was (as I did not know until later) a reference to something which Flannery O’Connor wrote, that people thought she was a hillbilly nihilist, but she was actually a hillbilly Thomist.

Since the gentleman with the mug did not give me permission to use his name online (we didn’t discuss the matter), I’ll call him Peter. We had some interesting conversation, as I had at least heard of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and he had both heard of Henry George, and had some knowledge of attempts to get Georgist reform enacted, for example, in Detroit. We talked about that, and about other matters. It turns out that there is a musical group of Dominican priests who perform country/Western music, and are known as the Hillbilly Thomists. I thought of a very Catholic friend of mine at that the Patent Office; Peter didn’t know him, but the next time I see him, I hope to tell him about my new acquaintance, and this musical group.

Now, to get what used to be called second sleep.

After being a civil servant for more than twenty-five years, I have now received a step increase to GS-14, Step 10. I’m now being paid a little more than I was as a mere Step 9, which is nice, but I wish they would pay me my old salary, and let me churn out a few Office Actions less. Step 10 is the highest step, so unless I someday become a supervisor, or something special, this is as high as it gets for me; I’m not likely to become a GS-15.

Now, I hope to go back to sleep, before rising in four hours for another day of examining.

I work in the Knox Building (these days, I do so when I’m not teleworking). Some years ago, I had a conference with my then supervisor, He Who May Not Be Named, and another senior of mine, Mr. M. This would probably have been to decide whether I had written sound rejections, and whether we could go to the Board of Appeals with them in response to an applicant’s Appeal Brief. After the business part, Mr. M asked whether I knew the maiden name of Henry Knox’s wife.

“Lucy Fluckner,” I answered.

I don’t think that I told him that I knew this, not from my profound study of history, and superb memory, but because I had read a trilogy of historical mysteries by Barbara Hambly, writing as Barbara Hamilton, in which Abigail Adams solves murder mysteries.

On Thursday, the Toastmasters club held a hybrid meeting, and my friend Ian showed up in person. We didn’t discuss my writing about him, so Ian is a pseudonym. It was good to see him, and see that he at least appeared healthy, because he found out a few months ago that he had cancer, and took some time off to undergo treatment.

From what he said, he was treated only with radiation, not chemotherapy, so he didn’t have to deal with the side effects of chemo. He is well for now, as I understand it, but will need periodic examinations to make sure that the cancer has not returned.

Meanwhile, it’s cheering to see a cancer patient with good news.

At noon, USPTO Toastmasters held its club contest, in which three members competed, while others among us served as judges, timer, ballot counter, contest master, and so forth. One of the three won, and will go on to the Area level contest, and then possibly farther and farther; he might reach the Finals, and become World Champion of public speaking.

Even if he doesn’t, we had some entertainment.

Not too long ago, I received an email at work, with the following reminder on exercising care:

All suffering is the result of attachment.

— Buddha

All suffering is the result of attachments.

— Infosec

On Thursday, I gave a Toastmasters speech. Only one speaker had signed up to give a speech, so I figured I should step up. I chose to speak about Savonarola, the supposed mad monk of late fifteenth century Florence, responsible for the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which priceless art may have been destroyed, together with various luxuries and items of frivolity. I had read a bit about him, first in a children’s book, Tales of the Renaissance, and then in a history of Florence and some writings of Machiavelli. More recently, I read Jo Walton’s novel Lent, which makes an unlikely protagonist of Savonarola.

This led me to do a little more reading, and so I talked about the man, and made the point that while most of us today would not be comfortable with Savonarola, he was, for example, a friend of the scholar, humanist, and unorthodox religious thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and a more complicated man than one might think. He probably did have real sympathy and good intentions for the poor of Florence, for example.

Last week, I attended (remotely) a training session on Clear and Concise Writing; the Patent Office wants its employees to write clearly and well. What we were told mostly made good sense, although I could not help reflecting that Orwell had said it better in that classic, “Politics and the English Language.” Advice about avoiding excessive use of the passive voice, for example, is sound enough, but, though I do not dispute that words should not be strung together at excessive length or without a good organizing principle, I question whether short sentences are always to be preferred. Patent attorneys, after all, are not six year olds.

I posted a comment in the chat, asking what application of the precepts we were given would have done to the literary works of Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson. The instructor did have a response, but I’ve forgotten just what it was.

I applied for part-time telework Thursday morning. I’m teleworking now, but I’m an ad-hod teleworker due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and once the Patent Office moves to the next phase of reopening in late May, my authorization to telework expires. I wanted to make sure that the upload and download speeds of my home Internet connection were sufficient, so I called Xfinity. The voicemail system interpreted what I said as indicating that there was a problem requiring my modem to be restarted before I could speak with a human being, and would not accept my explanation to the contrary, nor let me speak with an agent.

I finally managed to obtain the information I needed from the Xfinity website, but dealing with voicemail was frustrating. I understand that businesses want to save money by having automated responses, but I wish Xfinity made it easier to communicate with a human about a non-standard problem. By the way, this month’s bill was forty dollars higher than before.

Also on Thursday, there was an online Town Hall at which the newly sworn in Director, Kathi Vidal, spoke and answered some questions. She was a Navy brat who started college at the age of sixteen, got an engineering degree, worked as an engineer, and later went to law school. She had had an interest in law, and as a child once asked her mother to get some law books from the library, so that she could read the cases, and have a leg up studying law.

She seems to be quite an impressive lady.