Time Travel to Tempe

I got a call from Michael Williams at the City of Tempe who said they had reproduced some old construction plans and they were ready for me to pick up. I was surprised they still had copies of construction documents from the late 80's when our building was built. He told me they stored documents from the 60's! Think about that. That means they must be storing plans for 75% of every structure in Tempe - and some have been rebuilt 2 or 3 times over. Whats even more incredible is how they store them. Have you ever seen an old black and white movie where the detective researches newspaper articles with a back-lit micofilm viewer? The public library in my hometown of Syracuse used to have one of those gizmos that I fooled with with when I was a kid. They are collectors items now, in a day when we can access the Library of Congress on our laptops at any Starbucks. Except... that's what Tempe still uses! Its kind of charming in a way. The results aren't so good however. Lots of the documents are smudged and the resolution is poor, but hey! - they delivered, fast and with a smile to boot. Here is Suzanne Garrido who worked hard to produce my huge stack of documents sitting at their hack-proof microfilm reader (sorry Ryan!)