Spoiler alert: It’s our brain.
Last year, we were contacted by an attorney who needed to serve some legal papers to someone who had just gone into a nursing home. The law firm had attempted to reach the person at their residence, but the wife told the process server that the man had recently gone into a nursing home, and she refused to provide a forwarding address.
The attorney only had a few days to serve the man and desperately needed to get the legal papers in his hands.
I told the attorney that it was going to be really difficult. Short of following the wife to the nursing home, the address wasn’t going to be found like some low-hanging fruit. And because of privacy restrictions, most nursing homes weren’t going to voluntarily provide the names of their residents. It also didn’t help that we are physically based 1,500 miles away from where the man was reported to be living.
But desperation, lack of time and limited options can bring out the best in us.
I told the law firm that I would do as much as I could from behind my desk and let them know the following morning what we could come up with.
There was no low-hanging fruit.
The investigative databases were not helpful.
His wife’s social media wasn’t showing anything.
Vehicle sightings reports didn’t come up with anything either.
But we caught a bit of a break when his daughter posted a photo of her father at the nursing home with a small dog. The problem was that there was so little detail in the photo and the scenery was so generic, it would have been difficult to figure out without lots of man hours of trying to triangulate his position. Doable, but not within the client’s budget, and certainly not in our limited time frame.
So we put it down for the day and started fresh in the morning.
Within 20 minutes, we had found him.
The man was living in a rural part of Georgia, so I figured that the family would put him in a nursing home pretty close by. And it turned out there weren’t many nursing homes near the residence of the family. The one nongeneric thing about the photo was that the building had vinyl siding; in the South, and particularly in the area we were looking at, most of the commercial buildings are brick.
So I did a quick Google search of the five closest nursing homes. The first three were brick, but the fourth had siding similar to that in the photo with the man’s daughter. Taking a look at the Facebook page for the nursing home, I saw hundreds of photos of their residents.
Going through the photos, we caught a glimpse of a man with the same dog, leash and harness as in the photo with his daughter.
He looked a bit different, cleanly shaven, but it was him.
Was it just dumb luck?
Maybe.
But the point here is that we didn’t find the guy through some fancy tool, artificial intelligence or nano-gadget (I might have just made up a word there).
And it wasn’t the magic all-in-one database.
Or any one of the dozens of databases that I pay thousands of dollars a month to access.
We used some simple common sense, a bit of problem-solving, an understanding of human behavior, some tenacity, a dash of magic dust and the most important tool that we have: our brains.
