I am not interested in trotting at all, neither are my groupmates but we got curious about why there are so few women among the best, strength and such things shouldn't matter as the horse is the one doing the running. According to logic it should be an advantage to be lighter, like women usually are. We'll be working with this project for two more weeks and right now it's looking alright.
People in positions of some kind of responsibility are often quite hard to get information from, especially when they can't be reached by phone and you have to send a mail. After the mail is sent the time it takes to get an answer varies a lot. Sometimes it can be quite long, which is quite frustrating as some try to prevent having to give you the documents you want. It might take multiple mails to prove to them that they really have to give you the info. I strongly suspect that many know it and that they actually test if you know it or if they can get away with keeping it.
Well, I decided to try to skip that extra mail conversation in one mail when noone answered the phone. I referred to the laws in the very first mail. Sadly this caused the person who got my mail to get angry. I tried to keep the mail nice but I suppose refering to the law is aggressive regardless of how you do it. Or well, this person at least seemed angry in the way he/she replied, informing me that I could have called or come there and that he/she knew very the laws very well.
As my mail was passed on from the original receiver the new one didn't know about the phonecall, and it was a too large geographic distance for me to cross. The mail also asked me to give a call, and so I did. I started with apologising about the way I might have come across and after that this person was very helpful and promised to give me everything I asked for as soon as possible. The person actually also asked if I wasn't interested in x and y as well, which I was but I hadn't thought I could get them here so I hadn't asked. It's great that some people are nice and don't work against you at least.
Despite not being a particular fan of working against people like in this kind of journalistics I'm still happy I have this course. Investigative journalism is very important for a good democratic society and it is something every journalist should learn, even if they don't necessarily end up working with that. It's also nice to work in a group from time to time. Soon Three Spades - That's what we call us - will have made some news, exactly what is for the future.