Katie Baldwin, Forensic Investigator

Part One

As I sit here at my desk, playing an intense game of Spider Solitaire and hoping against hope that no one calls me, I have an epiphany: I, Katie Baldwin, am a forensic investigator.

You may laugh at the high notions I harbor of my current career, but allow me to allay your doubts. Let us examine the seemingly disparate careers and discover together how truly similar they are.

A forensic investigator knows only that a crime has been committed. The who, how, what, and when are yet to be discovered. Bits of evidence must be unearthed, examined, and carefully pieced together to form a picture recreating the events of the crime and ultimately revealing the guilty party. Each clue is extracted from the scene, analyzed, and assigned its particular place and importance in relation to the whole. The forensic investigator may face resistance from witnesses, may be blinded by the cunning of the criminal, may be tossed about on a sea conflicting evidence, and may even curse the locked door of Time that prevents stepping back to into the actual event, but they are undaunted in their quest to dicover the truth. From clues and suggestions and bits of evidence, brought into the light and brilliantly arranged into a telling whole, the forensic investgator reveals the grisly details of the crime and allows the prosecutors to bring the guilty party to justice.

A customer service representative knows only that there is A PROBLEM WITH AN ACCOUNT. Much like the forensic investigator who cannot urge words of truth from a silenced murder victim, the customer service respresentative faces considerable obstacles in extracting from the agitated account holder just what this problem might be. Account holders are generally unable to articulate the problem they are having, much less tell us what they did to cause the problem in the first place. This is where meticulous evidence collection is key. If the problem involves the internet, checking the user's birthdate will often indicate whether the problems is user error or a system setting. If the problem tends toward phone processing, asking the customer if they are using a cell phone will sometimes uncover the root of the problem. Sadly, the length of time the customer has had the account in no way aids problem diagnosis - customers with accounts three or four years old are just as likely to never have consulted the Frequently Asked Questions and Account Tutorial pages as account holders of one month. The astute customer service representative will frame their questions in such a way as to avoid implying that the customer a) should not attempt to use a computer unsupervised, b) should think seriously about outsourcing all technically-related business tasks, or c) should just stop now and abandon all plans to own their own business. Allowing the customer to suspect that you think this about them will only impede your investigation.