Tuesday, January 16, 2007

The perils of Internet porn

Just thought I'd share a workplace experience from a few years back...

I was doing a media ring-a-round one day and logged on to Lawsy's website (address courtesy of Margaret Gees) to find his producers' contact details and was amazed to see the screen downloading a lurid pink background.

Then a banner came up with, 'I like 'em young and fresh', followed by images of, well, supposedly young and fresh 'Nasty Teens'.

Being in a shared office, I quickly pissed that screen off and shut down the Internet, then turned around to greet my boss (female) who had just walked into the room.

After providing her with a five minute update on my day's activities, I turned around and was aghast to see the 'Knocked up Black Chicks' web page large as life on my screen. It took me about five minutes before I was able to escape the hundreds of porn applets that had invaded my system.

I then had to explain to my boss what had happened as she was in the midst of emailing me a 'please explain'.

After all the excitement I phoned a friend at mX and told her about Lawsy's filth and the shit storm of hard core porn I'd just had to fight my way through. It turned out that hackers had got into his site - couldn't happen to a nicer bloke - and ran as that day's front page, including my colourful quotes.

Next day at work a 'Gold Edition' Hustler Magazine arrived in the mail addressed to me and was promptly opened by the boss. She retrieved the 'please explain' email from her drafts and got back to work.

PS - the mag contained a story about an erotica exhibition at Metro 5 Gallery who I did PR work for, so I survived again...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Loving it. Around the time of my first job, my mate and I used to send emails to each other with pics of 80s shows we found on the net. She would send me a 'punky brewster', I would send back a 'greatest american hero' etc. Trying to get clever, I did a search on diff'rent strokes, except spelt diff'rent properly (ie different). without paying close attention (as of course, I was meant to be working) I clicked into the first site found and boy oh boy those strokes were very different indeed.
Luck would have it that no-one was around because at that stage I was a cubicle dweller and my cubicle was
a) opposite the organistion's boardroom door
b) one cubicle and an office down from the director general's door
it could have been a very short career indeed.

Anonymous said...

Dear Cookster. I thought I would drop a comment here to help sell my new idea - it is a forum for pr people in Perth to have a gossip. It is called PR B*tch.
http://perthpr.blogspot.com
Please can you help me by emailing this to your colleagues in PR. The more people who get involved, the better.
Many thanks

dave said...

i'm glad to hear i'm not the only one to fall victim to the dreaded porn popup. there were times back home when some seriously dodgy (and illegal) stuff popped up on my work computer. no one saw, but what worries me more is that the images may have stayed in the cache and could someday be discovered. hopefully they'll be obsolete and destroyed before then. bloody spammers!!

Anonymous said...

Hey dood

Have you got a web link to that Knocked Up Black Chicks site? Sounds kinda cool.