Whoever runs a detective agency or works for it canāt exempt himself/herself from the social function that derive from the profession.
On December 31-th, around 20 pm the neighbors rang me at the door: a little dog was wandering in my street terrified from the fireworks lighted up by the ādouble moronsā that are the ones that not only fire them at midnight like āsimple moronsā would do, but they feel the need to test them also before the end of the year. The situation was clearly tragic for the poor dog that I immediately welcome in my home, despite my old dog grumbles.
In the meanwhile, my associate (more technological and social than myself) posted some warnings about the missing dog and right after that ākeyboard eggheadsā went wild and started describing the ācorrect procedureā to stick to in case of the finding of lost animals: call the traffic police department (that pick up quite never or, when they do pick up, they claim to be very busy at the moment). Even if the police had answered to the call and then had tried to get the dogcatcher (that canāt be called directly by the citizens), they would have stepped in only after the scared dog had run away or once he was already dead under a car. Almost 40 years of missing people tracings and private criminal investigations taught me that promptness is everything; my detective agency Octopus often investigated on crimes and misfortunes that occurred as a consequence of peopleās neglect and selfishness towards the victims.
The dog spent the whole night at my home, under the vigilant eye of my old dog (to whom itās very easy to become attached), and the next morning I called my local vet to read the microchip. Despite the fact that it was the first day of the year the vet came to my house! While he was proceeding with the chip reading, he was explaining to me that it would have been very complex to identify the owner if the dog had been microchipped out of the region, because he, as veterinarian that works in Lombardy, has access only to the dog registry of Lombardy. Thatās a big issue, above all for those dogs found on regional borders. Unfortunately, nobody, even if itās well known how many miles a stray dog can walk, has never thought about merging the regional dog registries in a unique national archive or even if someone had a thought about it, he would have quit the thing due to the usual privacy troubles that may derive.
Mutatis mutandis, it came up into my mind how many times detectives from my investigative agency Octopus have had to face similar problems during investigations on missing people: itās a declared, but never really existed, centralized and updated data bank with reports of missing people and unidentified corpses. Even on this matter, eggheads donāt fail to interfere, they have never had to trace someone, but they are capable of quoting by heart dates and protocol numbers (totally ignored in the real world) or archives (unfinished or never started).
My veterinarian traced back the little dogās owners, that hugged her again as of few minutes. While they were bringing her away, I couldnāt help myself from wondering on how it should have been gone if I had sticked to the correct procedure, delegating everything to others. And on how many times I was the one making the happiness of the clients of my detective agency Octopus, solving situations almost impossible to solve, exactly by ignoring the correct procedure.
Iāve also really appreciated my vetās sense of duty and devotion. Reality is that some jobs, like doctors, veterinarians, private or judicial police detectives, magistrates, lawyers, etc. lose the majority of their value if devotion is lacking. The good Samaritan of the Parable would have been a distracted and uncaring passer-by if he hadnāt stopped to help.