An unnamed attorney takes a look at his calendar and notices a function he’s supposed to attend at the Columbia Tower (the tallest building on the West Coast. It has a private club and restaurant on one of the top floors) on Saturday September 12. He yells to his secretary a few questions about it because he had forgotten it was coming up and over the years he has come to rely on his secretary for everything. Law school didn‘t teach him this but it laid the foundations for his learned helplessness. His secretary rolls her eyes and picks up the phone and tells the receptionist to find out when and where the dinner will take place passing the buck so she can keep looking at Facebook.
The receptionist, although not playing with a full deck and dumber than a bag of hammers, is at least attractive and she tries with the resources she has available to solve problems as they arise. She slowly scans her surroundings before taking any hasty action. Making a mental note of the electric typewriter and how heavy it is she picks up a pencil and remembers the pencil sharpeners in her elementary school classroom and how they were so tricky to use. Then she grabs a pen but quickly puts it back because she likes the other color better. Finally she picks up the phone to call the Columbia Center but can’t seem to figure out what number to call or who to talk to so she calls the legal messenger company because their number is programmed into her phone. She explains her story to the dispatcher, who says “no problem we can do that, just email us a messenger slip, the PDF is on our website or you could fax one over” The receptionist is thankful but also worried because she now faces a whole new set of challenges. 
the messenger slip with information redacted to protect the stupid
Stupefied by the big words like pee dee eff and unsure of how to use that thing they call a fax machine, she sends a text message to her roommate asking for further instructions. The roommate works in a bank and calls back to calm the receptionist and encourage her to use the fax machine but only after they talk for a while about the drinks they had last night at Paragon.
The receptionist then wanders around the office looking for a messenger slip. In the supply room behind the Fed Ex padded envelopes she finds some old triplicate forms and returns to her designated position at the front desk to begin the daunting task of filling out a messenger slip.
On a blank piece of paper she pulled from the typewriter she practices her penmanship for a while before diving into the real thing. After she writes GO TO Columbia Tower she looks at the pink and yellow copies of the triplicate form and says out loud “Oh my God! That is so cool! The words come through three times! OH - MY - GAWWD”
When she finishes writing out the slip. She sets out to find the fax machine in a room down the hall where she has heard beeping noises on a few occasions over the two years she has worked for the firm. The receptionist locates a small toaster-oven-sized thing near the big honking copy machine but she doesn’t know how to use it. So she makes herself a cup of tea and waits for a someone to come along that might send a fax so she could watch them and do like they do.
A short while later a guy from office services comes in and the receptionist gets him to help her but only after they talk for awhile about drinks at Paragon. On the third try the fax goes through. The first two attempts jammed when the triplicate form wrinkled up in the machine.
Meanwhile at the messenger company the fax comes in but the dispatcher forgot about it because the phone call from the receptionist was so long ago. But it’s marked ASAP so he hands the slip to a driver to take downtown right away. Then the dispatcher chirps me to let me know the driver is bringing me a slip with special instructions and it’s a RUSH.
Twelve minutes later the driver pulls up to Monorail and hands me the slip. When I read it I just have to laugh and shake my head because it truly is unbelievable horseshit. Then I ride up to 701 5th, which is the address for the Columbia Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. It’s on the corner of 5th & Columbia. You can drive there and when you get there you can park and get out of your car and go inside if you want, even on a Saturday.
I walk in and wait at the security desk for a while until Mr. Blue Blazer gets off the phone. Then I ask him a few questions and he repeats them back to me because they are so obvious and stupid that he thinks I must mean to be asking him something else. So I show him my messenger slip and tell him it’s from a law firm and they actually sent me here to ask him these questions. He says “are you shitting me? You should get a $100 tip for that.” We laugh about it for a while and before I can even dial the phone to call the receptionist with the important information I’ve obtained, the security guard is on the phone with a coworker saying “you’re not gonna believe this…they just sent a bike messenger here to ask how to get in the building”
All this energy expended. This amazing sequence of events set off by one lazy fat ass attorney who was worried about where to park his BMW.
The cost of a downtown RUSH. Embarrassing conversation. Passing the buck. A bike ride. A driver handoff. Three Nextel transmissions. A fax. Four phone calls. A text message. Are you fucking kidding me?
Bike messengers will always be necessary because of unique and critical situations like this.
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