Right, November 1979. That month sticks in my mind for one particular reason, a real lesson in… well, let’s call it ‘bureaucratic adventure’. I’d gotten my hands on this old shortwave radio, a real beast from way back, and I was determined to get it working. The problem? No manual. And this wasn’t some simple gadget you could just poke around in. This thing had more tubes and wires than I’d ever seen.
So, the quest began. First stop, the main library. They had a decent technical section, or so I thought. The librarian, bless her, looked at me like I’d asked for a map to the moon when I mentioned the model number. “Never heard of it, son. Maybe try the specialist archives?” Okay, fair enough.
The Grand Tour of ‘No’
The “specialist archives” turned out to be a dusty room in the basement of some government building, staffed by a guy who seemed to be older than the radio itself. He shuffled through cards for what felt like an eternity, then announced, “Ah, yes. We might have had that. But it would have been transferred to the ‘Central Depository’.” Where was that? Another bus ride across town, of course.
At the Central Depository, which was basically a warehouse full of paper, I had to fill out three forms, in triplicate, mind you. In triplicate! Just to request a search. They said it would take “four to six weeks” to even know if they had it. I remember thinking, “Are they carving the answer on a stone tablet?”
- Week one: Silence.
- Week two: More silence. I called. “It’s in process,” a voice droned.
- Week three: I actually went back. The same forms were still in an ‘incoming’ tray. No one had touched them.
I was getting pretty fed up. I talked to a ham radio enthusiast I knew, an older fella. He just chuckled. “Oh, you’re going through the system,” he said. “Good luck with that. Most of us just trade photocopies of photocopies.”
Eventually, after what must have been nearly two months, not six weeks, a letter arrived. Not the manual, oh no. A letter stating that the document reference was “ambiguous” and I needed to provide more details. What details? I gave them everything I had! The radio was practically my only detail!
In the end, you know what I did? I gave up on the official channels. That old ham radio guy, he eventually found a tattered, coffee-stained copy of a similar model’s schematic from a friend of a friend in another state. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to get me started. I got the radio working, sort of. It crackled more than it talked, but it was a victory nonetheless.
It taught me something, that whole ordeal. Sometimes, the official way is the longest, most frustrating way possible. And that “four to six weeks” can mean “never, unless you make a real nuisance of yourself.” Makes you wonder how anything got done back then. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s not all that different now, just with different forms to fill out online, lost in different digital black holes.
