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On June 18, 1990, I reported to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to begin my career as a Patent Examiner. Many of the details of that first day have faded from my memory, but I do remember having to complete a bewildering stack of paperwork, and I do remember being sworn in as a federal employee. I'm pretty sure I got to meet my first supervisor that day, and that he took me around to meet the people I would be working with after I completed my initial training.
I know that I was nervous...I had little idea about what to expect from this new job. I knew very little about patents and patent law, and I was about to go through a rather intense two week introduction to the legal terminology and concepts that would define most of what I would be doing every day on the job. At the end of that all-too-short training class, I would have to learn on the fly. I would be handed a patent application and told to examine it. I remember being overwhelmed, initially, but quickly found my footing, with the assistance of the primary examiner who would become my mentor.
Now, a quarter century later, I have been doing that same job for more than half of my life. At the beginning of my career, twenty-five years seemed almost impossibly far away, but now it feels as if it has almost flown by. I have seen so many co-workers come and go. The Office has relocated from Arlington to Alexandria. The paper files we relied upon when I started are all gone now, replaced by digital files floating in a computer network. More and more of my colleagues work from home full-time, scattered across the country...I no longer can just walk down the hall and stick my head in to their office to chat. The fundamentals of what I do every day remain the same, but at a cosmetic level, it hardly looks like the same job any more.
I have just a bit more than nine years to go before I reach my minimum retirement age, where I can begin collecting my pension. While I enjoy my job (for the most part), I don't expect that I will linger here very long past that date. How many more things will change before I retire? It will be interesting to see the changes, but I expect the time will fly by and a decade from now I'll be looking back at a completed career, wondering where all the time went.
I know that I was nervous...I had little idea about what to expect from this new job. I knew very little about patents and patent law, and I was about to go through a rather intense two week introduction to the legal terminology and concepts that would define most of what I would be doing every day on the job. At the end of that all-too-short training class, I would have to learn on the fly. I would be handed a patent application and told to examine it. I remember being overwhelmed, initially, but quickly found my footing, with the assistance of the primary examiner who would become my mentor.
Now, a quarter century later, I have been doing that same job for more than half of my life. At the beginning of my career, twenty-five years seemed almost impossibly far away, but now it feels as if it has almost flown by. I have seen so many co-workers come and go. The Office has relocated from Arlington to Alexandria. The paper files we relied upon when I started are all gone now, replaced by digital files floating in a computer network. More and more of my colleagues work from home full-time, scattered across the country...I no longer can just walk down the hall and stick my head in to their office to chat. The fundamentals of what I do every day remain the same, but at a cosmetic level, it hardly looks like the same job any more.
I have just a bit more than nine years to go before I reach my minimum retirement age, where I can begin collecting my pension. While I enjoy my job (for the most part), I don't expect that I will linger here very long past that date. How many more things will change before I retire? It will be interesting to see the changes, but I expect the time will fly by and a decade from now I'll be looking back at a completed career, wondering where all the time went.
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