Would Sherlock Holmes have brought you lunch?

August 8, 2010

Below is an email I received from a fellow American living in Samoa and gave me permission to publish it. The predicament is one with which I am familiar and one a foreigner can expect when living abroad.

"We have an opportunity to catch the thief who has broken into our house twice now, because he stole and is using one of our cell phones. All we need to do is go to the service provider and get the phone records and connect the dots on who the thief was calling or receiving calls from. Our security officer and I were eager to get this information ourselves and start the investigation, but we learned that we must go through the police department in order to get the phone records. So we went down to the station on Monday and talked to the officer in charge of our case and he assured us he would have the phone records by tomorrow and we could start to locate the thief. So we waited... and waited... and waited... and finally we were promised delivery of the phone records on Friday morning by the officer. Not surprisingly he didn't show. While laying in bed and reading on Saturday morning I get a phone call from the officer saying he was one his way to my house to drop off the records. Two hours later (I live 10 minutes from the station) he showed up with the phone records and two cans of corned beef. He told me to boil some rice so we could have lunch. We sat down to look at the records and they turned out to be from a 10-day span from before the robbery even took place. Three years of cultural conditioning have trained me to not hurl obscenities or less than kindly instruct the officer how to do his job, and since he was already there, we thought we might as well have lunch anyways. So over some corned beef and rice we talked about our jobs and I jotted down some notes on the search warrant to help him refine his phone records search. (The same notes I gave him in his office on Monday) After lunch he left and said he would try again next week. I just hope his next search doesn't end in another corned beef lunch. Wish me luck..."