Updated: All over the map

Okay, I know that it has been a long time since my last post, and I am sorry for that. I don't even really have an excuse other than pure laziness. I promise to try harder :)

The big news for me this week is...I HAVE A COUCH!!!!!! For 8 weeks I've only had one chair in my living room, now it looks like a real person lives here! My couch was very generously donated by my Aunt Cindy, and I am very grateful to her for it. It matches my apartment really well and is very comfortable. Here it is:



Mom and Dad came to visit me this week; dad has a business trip here and mom tagged along. We had a good time, it was my first time ever "hosting" my parents! I set up the "guest bed" (air bed) for them in the "guest room" (dining room) and everything went great. Another nice perk was they brought a lot of my stuff that did not make the cut in the July move due to space limitations, including my old desktop computer, my cello, and my skis and associated gear (I must say, I felt pretty ridiculous carrying skis around in virginia in Summer, but whatev). As for the couch, for a few minutes we were worried it would not fit through my apartment door(!) but we managed to work it through. Also making things interesting while moving the couch was worrying about the sprinkler system, which leads me to another story...

(BTW, its very possible I've already written about this story) So, a few weeks back, I'm in my apartment and I can hear a very faint fire alarm going off and what sounds like a shower running in the hallway a few doors down. So I go out to investigate and make my way over to the elevators and hear what sounds like a waterfall inside all 4 of the elevator shafts. Also through the elevator shafts, I hear an alarm beeping and a voice recording saying "there is a fire emergency in the building, please evacuate the building." Now, I think its weird that there is a fire alarm going off telling me to evacuate and I couldn't even hear it in my apartment. So I decide to go downstairs to figure out what is actually happening, because it is 11pm and I don't want to evacuate the building in my pajamas when I was just about to go to bed. I get downstairs and the lobby is completely flooded and getting worse, water is coming down from the ceiling all over the place and there are firemen there trying to figure out how to work the elevators using the firemen's operation. So I ask around and it turns out, someone hit a sprinkler on the 10th floor, and water was dripping down into all the hallways and apartments below it in that wing of the building, which thankfully, I do not live in, PHEW! And how do you think they hit the sprinkler??? MOVING A COUCH INTO THEIR APARTMENT!!! So whoever designed our fire suppression system was not very bright. The ceiling in the hallways right outside apartment doors are about 8 inches lower than the rest of the hall, and this lowered area right outside everyone's doors is where the placed all of the sprinklers, I'm actually pretty shocked this has not happened before. So, I learned my lesson from these poor people, watch out for sprinklers when moving large furniture!

So back to my actual post. I actually don't know if I was going anywhere in particular before, so I do not know what I am going "back" to. But I'll just continue rambling about what is going on in my life. This is my last week of work before I am considered to be "on production". Basically, this means, starting next week, I will begin submitting reports on the cases I examine and sending them out to attorneys and applicants. It also means that we are accountable for our work now and not just sitting in lectures and practicing examining. I am slightly nervous about starting production but we have 6 more months before we are expected to get up to 100% production. For those of you who are confused about "production", here is what it literally means. First, the life of a patent application: every patent application that comes in to the office (heretofore referred to as "a case") is assigned to a patent examiner (me) for review. We go over everything the applicant is trying to claim in their application (in other words, everything the applicant thinks they have invented and want legal protection for) and send a response (heretofore referred to as an "office action") to them letting them know which claims are patentable and which ones are not. The applicants then get 6 months to respond with amended or withdrawn claims. We then look over the amendments they have made and decide if the changes they made qualify the application for patentability. After this, we either do a final rejection, or an allowance. Patent examiner performance is purely based on how many cases you get through in a biweek. Based on your gs-level (salary) and the complexity of the technology you examine, there are a different number of cases that you a expected to examine. Every case is worth two "counts". One count for the first office action, and one count for either a final rejection or an allowance. Being on production means that you have to get X number of counts per biweek. If you do it, great. That is almost the only thing that is used to evaluate us in our job. If you produce 105% of the counts you are expected to, you become eligible for promotions and bonuses. One of the best and worst parts of this job is that your performance is almost exclusive evaluated on whether or not you meet your production goals. On one hand, you always know where you stand, you never wonder whether or not you are doing a good enough job, but at the same time, if you can not meet production, there is really nothing you can do to help your cause. But, like I said earlier, they do not expect us to be anywhere close to 100% production for quite some time.

Another perk of next week is I get to switch to the flexible work schedule. Since we spend significantly less time in lectures when we are on production, we are basically allowed to work whenever we want. We can choose to work 8, 9 hour days and 1, 8 hour day or 8, 10 hour days per biweek. We are also allowed to get to work as late as 9:30am, however I will probably try to get there around 8 or 8:30, which will still be a welcome break from the last 8 weeks of having to be at work by 7:30 everyday.

Well, thats what has been going on in my life recently. What's up with you guys?