OddThinking

Today being April 1st, I thought I would share a story of an April Fool’s Joke. It was about 5-7 years ago, I think, so I am hoping the statute of limitations has expired, even though some of my regular readers may still remember this story when it happened.

Background

Back in those days, I was working for an American multinational in Research and Development. We were strongly encouraged to submit patent applications to protect the intellectual property we were creating. However, patents are expensive to obtain and to defend, so there were some process hurdles to get through before an idea would hit the patent office.

When a local employee, or group of employees, had an idea, they would fill in a form describing the idea, and it would be submitted to a peer group here in Australia to be reviewed. If it passed that level, it would be forwarded to a corporate attorney specialising in Intellectual Property, in the US, where it would go before another higher-powered committee before being sent off to be drafted for submission to the appropriate Patent Offices.

Many of us had battled with this patent idea form which asked questions which sounded clumsy to the engineers, but elicited the answers needed for the attorneys to assess ideas that were outside their area of expertise. One example related to the search for “prior art” – to see if some competitor had already had the idea. There were some arcane rules about where we should – and where we mustn’t – search for prior art, and one of the sections required us to fill in details about where we looked, including details of web searches, if any.

The Preparation

Anyway, one day I was thinking about the tradition of April Fools’ Day RFC Submissions and thought it would be fun to do a similar parody, but based on the Patent Submission form – sure the audience would be much smaller, but why not? It isn’t a nasty prank. It isn’t trying to embarrass anyone. It is just a little-hearted parody.

On Good Friday, shortly before April 1st, I sat down and put together a parody submission form. I bounced the idea off a couple of friendly colleagues, got their buy-in and quite a few suggestions and review comments, and updated it again that night. It was all ready for April 1st.

The Implementation

Voice over IP and Video over IP were common areas of patents, so I decided Smell over IP would be a good gag. After a bit of searching, it turned out that idea had been done (both jokingly and semi-seriously) before, so I decided to fold in the idea of Quality of Service – another area where patent submissions were common.

In the appropriate sections of the form, I described a problem. We were all familiar (I explained, tongue-in-cheek,) with the Smell over IP protocols, but in practice, packet loss lead to serious degradation of the smells being transmitted. With the innovative QoS invention, we could guarantee that smells were correctly received.

The document was chockful of bad puns (with the N.O.S.E. subsystem being responsible for testing the integrity of the smell) and inside jokes. I can remember barely any of them.

I do recall in the prior art section, I had written a number of Google search terms, such as:

• “Smell over IP” QoS
• “Smell over IP” QoS -“Horny Housewives”
• “Smell over IP” QoS -“Horny Housewives” -“sexy teens”
• “Smell over IP” QoS -“Horny Housewives” -“sexy teens” -“naked”
• Ah, forget it!

The Execution

On April 1st, I emailed this document to the local patent committee, cc’ing the rest of the R&D department that had been involved in the patent submission process. There was a great reaction. People congratulated me, saying they found it hilarious. The Australian director mentioned it in the R&D Department Meeting, suggesting people read it.

Then he told me to send it on to our US patent attorney.

“Really?” I asked.
“Sure, he’ll love it!” explained the director. I was flattered he found it that amusing, so I sent a note to the US attorney saying “The director said I should share this with you.” and I attached the document. It was still April Fools’ Day morning in the US.

Aftermath

I got called into my director’s office the following Monday.

It seems that the attorney saw my name and the director’s name on the email, knew we had both being involved in several successful patent submissions before, and decided to forward the submission to the rest of the committee… without actually opening the attachment first.

With the document losing context – and a personal connection – he found himself embarassed when his committee members were (apparently) outraged at the nonsense.

Questions were asked about why I was wasting company time on such larks.

Someone with no sense of humour and/or no understanding of Google search terms got even more outraged that I had searched for porn using corporate resources!

My director was apologetic, and said he would take all the heat from the affair, but I said I would wear it. We both wrote apologetic letters, explaining that it had been written outside of work hours (Good Friday being a public holiday in Australia) and setting the record straight that the Google searches were not actually been performed (and in any case, were not intended to return any inappropriate material), and that no embarrassment or offense had been intended.

I kept a low profile with the patent committee after that, and I walked away with a sour taste in my mouth from the whole episode that still hasn’t quite faded after all these years.