My trip to the big city

Well, the dreaded trip into downtown I got to avoid last month (my boss went instead) caught up with me today.  No warning, "can you go down to the the city municipal building and try to find records of environmental studies done when we built this building?"  Oooohkaay, sure.  I actually found the building and parking easily, in the pouring rain and heavy winds.  My umbrella about got blow inside out but I made it into the block long building to find I had to go from the 6th floor entrance I was on back down to the 4th floor main lobby in order to find the bank of elevators that went from the 5-30th floors (there was another bank for 31-62) and then back up to the 20th floor.

Luckily there was absolutely no line at the check in desk and she took my information and sent me back to wait at the microfilm department for my name to be called. I was then handed two stacks of micofilm (or maybe it was fiche? I don't know, but I haven't used the stuff in 30 years back in the old days of libraries!) and told to help myself to a micofilm machine. I started searching through pages of documents.  Do you know what a Phase 1 Environmental study/report looks like? Me neither. I wasn't really finding anything that much resembled what I was told I needed (we were told to go here by the building architect), so I went back to the desk to ask if they had any additional fiche to look at. Nope. So I tried to call the architect on his cell, no answer.  I tried to call our company owner on his cell, no answer. So I went back up to the desk and asked the guy again if there were any other fiche that they might have on our building relating to environmental reports and he said no. I went back and looked through it all again and decided to request to print the pages that "might" have something to do with it.  While I was waiting for the guy to print those I tried calling the architect again. He was really no help as I tried to explain to him what pages I was finding on the fiche. Then he called it a "Level One" instead of a "phase one", so I asked the counter guy for a 3rd time, if there were any fiche with this name. Nope, I had all the fiche related to our building.

So, went to the cashier and paid the $30 for the copies I got, found my way back to my car, paid the $9 parking fee and went back to the office. Oh and did I mention that when the architect was telling my company owner where to go to get these reports he said "just get any of your lackey's to do it, it's easy". So when I handed my owner the copies I told him I don't think I was a very good "lackey", because I don't think I got what he needed!