Day I stopped counting -or- Is it possible to quantify awesome?

At work we have been working on our first Office Action. An Office Action is a patent examiner's (me) response to a patent application. We basically point out to the applicant the mistakes they made and why or why not their idea deserves a patent. Well, when you write this Office Action, a lot of the paragraphs have become so standard that you essentially copy and paste them into the document, other things you have to write yourself.

The hard part about these things is that it is a legal document which means that you have to be very careful about the words and language you choose to use. It actually does make a difference whether the examiner (me) or the applicant chooses to use the word "a" or the word "the". Needless to say, I was a bit nervous about writing one of these.

You begin with a blank page and dozens if not hundreds of these pre-written paragraphs to choose from. You not only have to decide which paragraph is the correct one to use based on what you found in the application but you also have to be able to say why it is the right paragraph. Our trainer said "Go write it up." so I jumped in.

I was very nearly done with it when the trainer sent us all an e-mail telling us to come to his office some time today and show him what we had written, I was the first one in his office. He looked it over and to my surprise he said it was of "Acceptable Quality". Now, that may not sound like much to all of you but that is the standard he told us to shoot for and I got it on my first one! He noted some minor mistakes that I needed to fix and told me how to fix a couple of areas that I had questions about but all in all, he said that it was a good Office Action. I was pretty damn proud to hear that.

Just a little side note, for those of you who think you are paying my salary, you know who you are and if you don't your names are Kelley, Jeff, Don and Gail, you're not paying my salary. The US Patent and Trademark Office is the only government institution that is totally fee funded. That means that all the money we use comes from the folks who pay to file a patent - so much so that once in a while Congress asks us for some. So there!