“Ooh, that’s interesting!”

The most often used phrase when people see me at work. My name is Eddie Collins and I’m a CSI. A proper CSI, not one of those actor-types from CSI-bleeding-Miami!

I suppose if you’ve never seen any kind of forensic work, then seeing me in ‘action’ could be quite interesting. But don’t believe everything Hollywood tells you about this job. Don’t be so gullible, come on! They have an hour to fill – oh wait, forty minutes, I forgot about adverts. And at the 39^th minute, the viewer demands a clever outcome, a twist that’ll leave them going, ‘Ooh, that’s interesting’.

That doesn’t happen in real life. Sorry, but it’s true.

So here are one or two misnomers rippling through polite society these days courtesy of film and television.

Light is good. No one searched for that elusive fibre, or that single hair in the back seat of a car using a £1.99 pen torch from Aldi; or even one that’s free with £10 of diesel from Sainsbury’s. Really. When I search for fibres I want a football stadium floodlight in there, dammit. Never mind the sexy sultry backlighting, picked out with blue feckin neon. I need to see the bastard!

Sometimes using a pencil is bad. Really bad. No one these days ever picks up a firearm using a pencil shoved down the barrel. It might have looked cool when Dirty Harry did in in 1976 (did he? I don’t know; I never watched Dirty Harry – it was just an example), but these days it makes you look like a dunce. We need that barrel undamaged by your Staedtler HB, and we certainly don’t want the eraser jammed in there. We (sorry, not ‘we’; I mean the ballistics laboratory) may need to test fire it to see if the striation marks from the test bullet match those found in the victim to see if that was murder weapon. So don’t introduce new damage that could change all that. When picking up a firearm, use your gloved hands. Ta-daa!

Although some might see it as a courtesy, we never invite the suspect back to the scene of a murder, even if it’s starting to rain and the wind’s getting up a bit. I once read a book – sorry, I mean I once began to read a book by a rather prominent author who did just that. I slammed the book shut, and never went near it, or the author, again. Even if the chap you have in cuffs is really pleasant, even if he offers to buy you a Starbucks and one of those yummy blueberry muffins, you must resist. You see, once he’s back in there, nudging the body to see if it really is dead, maybe having  a pot of English Breakfast and a slice of toast with you and your fellow detectives, all trace evidence that your over-worked CSIs might find, is utterly useless in a prosecution against him. Yep, it’s called contamination. It has bitten many a writer (and many a detective!) on the bum so hard that it drew blood.

Stilettos. They look great, don’t they? But they’re ever so uncomfortable. So I’ve been told. Being a CSI is not glamorous. Not at all. Not one bit. You might find yourself in a kitchen with slugs crawling across the worktop (true!), and more insects in the air than you can shake a shitty stick at; or you might find yourself in a graveyard digging up a body – it turned out to be a dead tortoise that some kid had buried (true); or you might be pulling someone’s severed fingers out of the spikes on a security fence as you’re balancing on old car tyres down by the railway (also true). I’ve yet to find a crime scene where stilettos would be the preferred footwear, although I do keep looking. I wear Haix boots that weigh just less than two tonnes. They have steel in the sole so I can walk on broken glass and across fire debris without hurting my bunions. Haven’t quite mastered walking on water yet though.

One other thing before I let you go. This is only a part-misnomer because, unfortunately, some people – police included – still say them. Never use these words: dabs (as in fingerprints), and claret (as in blood). Both of these words are guaranteed to make you look like a tool, and have your CSI backing away from you as though you’re riddled with the lurgy. Sure, they were great in The Sweeney, as was ‘blag’! But not so cool at a crime scene in Leeds. We prefer to use the words ‘fingerprints’ or if you’re feeling particularly hip, ‘prints’; and we also like to say… wait for it… ‘blood’. I know, crazy, huh! Also heard within the confines of many a good ol’ crime scene are the perennial favourites: hoof-prints (worth a slap every single time), forensicate (grrr), a coat of looking at – find that in the dictionary and I’ll give you a blueberry muffin. We never ‘box off’, and we never ‘Jack up’ anything! I promise you, you will be forever regarded as a tool if you say any of those in front of me. And, I might just turf you out of my scene.

So yes, being a CSI is interesting. It just tends to be compromised by people unfortunately.