Lunch with Patent at Obento-Ya

Last week, I had lunch at Obento-Ya with my friend who I'll nickname Patent.  Patent recently passed the test to become a patent agent.  He's not a lawyer, but with his certification, he can write and argue patents in front of the US Patent office; he just can't sue anyone for patent infringement or anything like that.

First off, I would recommend Obento-Ya and it's a nice place for lunch.  They have over 10 options for Japanese bento boxes and the ones that Patent and I ordered were both very good.  These bento boxes come with a meat, rice, a salad, potatoes, and miso soup.  Very good value at $9.  It's a fairly small space and it reminds me a lot of Midori's Floating World, their old location especially.  (I would recommend Midori's too.) 

We were meeting because in one of my recent interviews, I had an idea.  We were discussing current problems with their device and I just blurted out something that popped into my head that sounded good.  We didn't really talk about my idea and moved on to other stuff.  Since then, I searched google patents and did general google searches and surprisingly, no one else has thought of this.  I have other patents, though I generally feel like they were just timing.  Maybe I'm being modest, but I assume that if other engineers that had worked on those projects, they would have also had patents because they would have faced the same problems I did.  I kinda feel the same way about this patent idea.  Also, as this is something that just popped into my head and sounds good in theory, I have no idea if it would work in practice.

Anyway, Patent advised me to write something called a provisional patent.  What's kind of cool is that it only costs $110 to file it.  So the strategy is I'd write up the provisional patent, and then shop it around.  As I don't really have any contacts, I'd go back to the company I interviewed with.  And provisional patents don't really count until you file for real (which would cost well into the thousands).  Maybe I shop it around and get nothing, or maybe somebody thinks it's worth something and then things'd get interesting from there.

I have no idea if this post was interesting to anyone, but to me, it's cool that you can do something like this so cheaply.