The US Patent Office can’t accept faxes that are upside down. The used to when Einstein worked there because he knew how to rotate a document 180 degrees, but now he’s gone and apparently no one knows how to do that. I didn’t even know there was a right-side-up and upside-down to the fax machine; I just paid attention to making sure the printed side was facing the right way.
Anyway, this is the government that wants to run your health care. Luckily, if the death panel decides you need to die, they’ll probably screw that up too.
Previously, if the request was upside down, you ended up registering a satanic version of your product. Or is that if the fax is backwards? I can never remember which.
Under Obamacare, you will have to be careful which way a patient is rolled into the operating room. If the patient is scheduled to have corrective surgery on his/her feet, yet is rolled in backwards, that patient may accidentally have brain surgery, as no one will have been hired that can rotate the patient 180-degrees, and since hospitals will now be union shops, if anyone rotates the gurney without that action included in their work agreement, they will be in violation of union rules, will be labeled a scab, and will have rocks thrown at their car when they pull in to work the next day.
On Moe Lane’s blog, he links to the reason for this idiocy: it seems that they have an automated processing system for telefaxes, and it craters if it doesn’t find the page header where it is supposed to be. Sounds reasonable, no?
No. What they are basically saying is “the system won’t let us process [it]“.
In any of the jobs and positions that I’ve held, anyone who told the boss “the system won’t let us…” was scarcely allowed to finish the sentence before being vigorously marched out the door, termination notice in hand. Private sector bosses do not let ‘the system’ limit them, do not take instruction from machines, and have a deep and abiding aversion to those worthless idiots who do.
Whoever wrote that FAQ response for the Patent Office is a mindless dolt. Hope he gets a position on the health care death panel; they’ll never approve anything with this idiot aboard.
Shoot. ObamaCorp sure could stand to learn some lessons in efficiency from Gulag slave drivers.
That reminds me of the time I was at Home Depot and I had to wait in line behind a Patent Office staffer. The guy wanted his money back on the sack of nails he bought, because half of them had the point on the wrong end.
The explanation why it must be faxed in a specific orientation…
“In a routine fax transmission, page orientation (top of the page first
into the machine or bottom of the page first) is not critical because
the reader can easily flip and arrange the pages to read them top to
bottom. However, it is critical to our process that each page is faxed
top to bottom with the top margin being fed first into the machine. Once
they have been received in PTAS, fax transmitted assignments are
processed strictly by electronic means. Although the PTAS software can
rotate a document 180 degrees for viewing purposes, when the electronic
document is extracted to generate the archival microfilm record, each
page is extracted exactly as it was first received. Accordingly, a
document sent “upside down” would be microfilmed upside down. To further complicate matters, because the system generated recordation and reel and frame markings on the pages would be in the opposite orientation, the resulting document would be difficult to read.”
So some poor schmuck develops a miracle drug that cures all cancer and faxes it in to the Patent Office and is told No Patent For You! Sounds like the Soup Nazi
Well if i received one of these rejections in the mail, I’d reject it right back. “I’m afraid your rejection was not printed on ‘Spacemonkey approved rejection paper stock’ nor was a Elvish translation provided as noted clearly on the back of my mailbox. “
We could, ah I got nuthin!
Guys, filing a patent is not like doing something useful. It is a legal process, and has to be done with extreme attention to details. Get with the program!
I have filed several patent applications. The first were rejected because the effing Soviets actually had filed a patent on my invention some years before my bright idea. Don’t always believe that the Russians just copy our work.(I still got the PhD, though, so those grad school research years weren’t totally wasted. The next applicatrion went through to a patent, but I was in a new job by that time so the company took my name off it. The last ones I filed myself as an entrepreneur. Those were fun.
Anyhow, there is an opportunity here to develop software/hardware that can recognize the right-side-up orientation of a fax and automatically format the document in that manner so the auto-filing at the Patent Office will work more easily. I would guess the feds would pay up to two gazillion dollars for that product. Anybody know how to make it work? Cuz I’m filing the initial patent application today, and would welcome an engineer/programmer partner or two to help. Investors, also let me know!
Except that if they decide you should live, the government health care will kill you anyway.
Private sector bosses do not let ‘the system’ limit them, do not take instruction from machines, and have a deep and abiding aversion to those worthless idiots who do.
Well, good private sector bosses are like that; I’ve encountered many who had made careers of letting ‘the system’ limit them.
The US Patent Office can’t accept faxes that are upside down. The used to when Einstein worked there
Actually, Einstein never worked in the US Patent Office; he worked in the Swiss patent office, which, as far as I know, doesn’t care about the orientation of FAXes.
This sounds like a job for the Office of Circumlocution to straighten out.
They also won’t accept patent submissions that aren’t in the proper patent approved and customized font. Because lord knows how hard it is to pick a different font from the drop down list at the top of your toolbar.
When I saw your tweet linking to this, I figured that “Great Moments in Bureaucracy” would link to an empty page.
(The only good bureaucrat is an unemployed bureaucrat…or maybe one who’s going back to school to learn how to join the productive class.)
Hmmm, the government hindering innovation…who’da thunk it?
“What you punish, you get less of. What you reward, you get more of.”
I can sympathize though. I HATE getting a bag of M&Ms and half the darn things have Ws on them instead!
#17 – Silhouette,
You’re lucky. My M&M have a bunch of 3’s and E’s mixed in too.