My husband, in the bathroom, with the razor

Recently, while scraping the toothpaste plops out of our bathroom sink in anticipation of holiday guests, I had an epiphany.

Law enforcement agencies desperately need my expertise.

While it is true that our ever-mobile military lifestyle has made it nearly impossible for me to pursue a career outside of the home in my 20 years as a Navy wife, I realized, while staring at myself in our spit-spattered mirror, that all these years of tedious bathroom scrubbing has provided me with more than enough of the practical training needed to become a forensic crime scene investigator.

I mean, why would the FBI, DEA, NCIS, or those people on “Law & Order” take a chance employing some young punk, fresh out of criminal justice school, who’s had more experience playing video games than analyzing real-world physical evidence; when they could have me — a mature professional who has spent half her life processing bodily fluids, spatter stains, drip patterns, hair specimens, and other repulsive trace evidence as an unpaid volunteer?

Anyone who’s anyone in the forensic science world knows the “Locard Exchange Principal” — I looked it up on Wikipedia — which theorizes that every person who enters or exits an area will deposit or remove physical material from the scene, and who knows this theory better than a housewife?

Take it from me, when my husband enters an area — the bathroom in particular — he definitely deposits a veritable plethora of most unfortunate biological material, and just like ol’ Locar theorized, it’s up to me to enter that area to remove it all.

Consider, if you will, our bathroom.

My skills of analysis have become so acute, so innate, that I can walk into our bathroom any time of the day or night, and determine with incredible accuracy, the specific events that have taken place there and the perpetrators involved.

Before entering the crime scene, a.k.a., our bathroom, I take all necessary “first responder” safety precautions to protect myself against contamination. Rubber gloves are strongly recommended, eye protection is optional, but never, I mean never, go in there without shoes unless you’re coated in anti-fungal ointment.

Then, using my ocular and olfactory senses, I take a general reading of the amount of evidence deposited in our bathroom to determine the tools necessary to complete the task. In other words, will this job take a simple container of bathroom wipes? Or, does the quantity of biological evidence in this seven-by-five foot space warrant the employment of buckets, mops, sponges, rags, brushes, squeegees, sandpaper, plungers, augers, a Shop-Vac, industrial-grade disinfectants,dangerous corrosive acids, and a chisel?

Most often, our bathroom contains a mountain of evidence, requiring me to bring out the big guns.

Next, I process the toilet. A thankless task involving unspeakable biological specimens, suffice it to say that I don’t need a Petri dish or a DNA test to know exactly what my husband did there that morning before leaving the seat up for the umpteenth time.

I then turn my attention to the shower area, where hair specimens on the soap and floor mat indicate that my husband took a shower at approximately 6:23 am. I know this because, despite years of pleading my husband to dry himself inside the tub to spare us the inevitable tumbleweeds of body hair on the floor, he thoroughly enjoys a vigorous exfoliating of his abundantly hairy Italian body parts in the middle of the room with one foot poised on the toilet for balance.

Finally, I process our sink, which contain obvious indications that my husband shaved, flossed, brushed his teeth, gargled, spit, and winked at himself in the mirror between 6:44 and 6:57 am. How do I know this? Easy. My husband carelessly left a drip trail of stubbles and shaving cream in the sink, floss debris cast-off on our mirror, and an expiration pattern of spit spatter over the entire area. Using my vast experience with cohesion, velocity, angle of impact and pattern analysis, I can even tell that he used the hand towel to clear a strip across the mirror, just so he could admire himself just before leaving the scene of the crime.

Housewife or no housewife, I clearly have skills and will be inundated with lucrative employment offers once they become public.

Although I will make every effort to consider all reasonable propositions, the law enforcement officials may have to wait, because my work at home is never done.