FOR many people, going to the records department of a government office to retrieve a certain document is as thrilling as going to the dentist. I was unlucky enough to have gone through the ordeal once again last Friday when I went to the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB).

You see, I made a mistake of purchasing a condominium unit at Dansalan Gardens on Boni Avenue. Construction of the project, codeveloped by DM Consunji and Universal Rightfield Property Holdings, was discontinued early this year. Problem is, I had been paying them from August of 1998 to June of 1999.

Needless to say, I spent a lot of hard-earned money for that condo where I was hoping to start a family.

I decided to bail out of the project and stop payment because the developers themselves couldn't tell me when they would continue construction. My unit was on the 29th floor, but the project was halted at around the fourth or fifth floor. They had promised completion of the project by January 2000, but now that would be impossible.

And so I asked for a refund. And what did they tell me? That it would take months to years for the full refund to be given. This also derailed my plans for the future by years.

And so my lawyer-friend advised me to go to the HLURB to do some sleuthing before we could proceed. That's how I found myself at the dentist's chair_I mean the records section of a government office.

After extensively reading and writing about technology and how computers would revolutionize the way we store, manage and distribute information, I found that retrieving the license to sell Dansalan was as harrowing an experience as purchasing a condo unit in the place.

I was thinking that I would be face-to-face with someone with a computer at his or her desk, then I would tell him or her the data I needed and he or she would just punch in some passwords and voila!_the data would be there.

But such a thought is only for the naive.

In reality, I was faced with a queue of restless and sweating people. Then I had to talk to someone from behind an ill-designed glass panel which separated the government employees in their air-conditioned sanctuary from the perspiring masses frying under the sun in their queue.

I was lucky, though. When my turn came they informed me that the records I needed were upstairs. I went up and sought refuge from the angry sun and bathed in the comfort of a beat-up electric fan in its death throes (beggars can't be choosers, I guess).

When I stated my purpose to the clerk with dimples, she said the person holding the Dansalan records was in a meeting with their new boss.

"Is she physically holding on to the records?" I asked clerk-with-dimples. She didn't know. Clueless.

And so she went around that small office trying to look for a folder or something. For 15 minutes clerk-with-dimples went around the place like a headless chicken, after which she miraculously evolved deductive reasoning and thought that the records must be with the person in the meeting. From the open door of the meeting room, clerk-with-dimples signaled for that person to come out. She fingered her, and mouthed what I thought was the word "records."

I saw an arm reach out of the door. In that person's hand was a thick folder.

And so ended the quest of clerk-with-dimples toward the search for common sense and the records of Dansalan Gardens.

Now, what's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong is that even when it comes to records which the public access daily, government computerization is still a big joke. Go to the LTO, the NSO and yes, the HLURB and you'd find out why getting data from government offices is right up there in my list of favorite events_ranking next only to my grandma's funeral.

The upside to all this is that the Y2K bug won't bite government offices that much because there's not much data processing going on in the first place. So when those jokers tell you that the government is 80- or 90- or even 100-percent compliant, ask them: "Which systems? The coffeemaker down the hall or the video player inside the chief's office?"

Still, computers or no computers, my journey to the HLURB turned out to be fruitful. Very fruitful.

Even without the aid of technology, clerk-with-dimples was able to provide me some curious details about the license to sell of Rightfield's and Consunji's Dansalan Gardens--complete with curious dates and curious limitations to the license itself.

But that's for another, bigger story--one you'll get to read soon.