Daddy's Girl

When I was little, I used to go on ride-alongs with my dad (who is a cop, for those of you who don't already know). I would watch him pull people over, and some people he'd arrest, and then we would both go back to his office and he would write reports about it. He said it was like grown-up homework; kinda like a book report except for real life. He explained to me that just like at home, when you're a grown-up and you do something wrong you need to be disciplined, and people couldn't be disciplined and learn their lesson if he didn't to the report right. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to catch bad people and write reports about them. I didn't necessarily want to be a cop, per se, but I wanted to be just like him.
 
One of the things I'm trained to do at my current job is to be able to spot documents that have either been altered or forged. Today I had someone try to pass me a federal document that was a complete forgery. I have to be able to know what to look for in a real document and quickly spot the problems in a fake one. I had to confiscate the document, and in order for any follow-through to happen, I had to write an incident report detailing the events and the document itself. An hour and a half and 9 pages later, I had a report written up detailing my interaction with the person, as well as copies of the document and a diagram of what I had noticed that indicate it was not genuine. My boss told me it was a "good catch." It was difficult to finish the report as well as  perform my other expected duties, but I managed it. And for just a minute, I felt like I was what I wanted to be: just like my dad.