BWA!

I once was a geek for a very large name-brand not-for-profit humanitarian relief organization. You all know the name. I worked in the home office.

The tone and tenor of this office, to say it was PC doesn't quite go there. The place literally radiated with a certain altruistic energy and along with this came this massive organizational honus to BE PROPER AND UPRIGHT AT ALL TIMES. Be squeaky clean in conduct, in attire, oh man did we get the sexual harrasement sensitivity training and the cultural awareness sensitivity training and the sensitivity to disabled persons and just every dang thing. We were some seriously sensitive people.

And it wasn't easy to secure a position there. You gotta articulate that certain something, that balls-to-the-walls dedication (not a term I'd use during my tenure there). So I land in the IT department and find myself in the company of some serious pro geeks from the Old Skool where ethics reign.

Confidentiality of data is a high geek ethic. And since we regularly have access to data belonging to people, or we might encounter people doing or behaving in various ways, we never tell unless it's clearly criminal behavior.

So yeah, one time at this venerable institution I came across some explicit material in somebodys web cache, but this was in the day when trick websites were doing that all the time and I didn't think much of it.

But management caught wind of something and asked us to put monitoring tools in place to see who might be viewing pr0n in the organization.

HEADS FREAKING ROLLED. WE COULDN'T BELIEVE IT. OMFG. There were people who it appeared were spending ALL OF THEIR TIME LOOKING AT PR0N if they weren't in a meeting. And we're not talking rank-and-file drones here.

It didn't go "straight to the top". It went right up to the VP level. Right up to the soles of VP shoes and no further. It was the executive level. OMFG.

We also found a bunch of people that spent their day day-trading stocks.

The rank-and-file we found were burying out internal LAN with "hamster dance" and other such dreck which tells you about how long ago that was. But at least they were getting their jobs done.