(FORTUNE Magazine) – I found the job through an ad in the Wausau paper; it described the job as a survey worker. Before that I did a lot of different things. I have a college degree in elementary education, so I taught school for a little bit. I ran my own business. I also did some restaurant work. Coming in, some of us, like myself, had very little knowledge of the consumer price index and how the numbers were put together. We're looking at price data--what does each item cost the shopper the day we are in that store? The CPI gauges how the prices change over time. Take a gallon of milk. We look at the brand, fat content, how it is packaged--plastic jug or carton. We can't possibly go to every store and look at every item, so we try to get a representative sample. When I started, back in 1997, our data collection was done by paper. Now we collect the data on tablet computers and then download the information to D.C.

The most interesting thing I have priced is probably a funeral home. We look at the cost of a funeral and all the different parts of it. What is the cremation cost? What is the cost of transferring the remains?

Sometimes I think about inflation, but not a great deal. We are so focused on looking for the specific item that sometimes you don't see much else.

--Interview by Julie Schlosser