I swear, it's work related

Posted by Casexcasey@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 17 comments

This is a story I heard second hand from a friend years ago, I've shared it before in comment form, but I'm curious how the folks who actually work in the trenches that are IT would weigh in.

So as my friend tells the story, it's some time in the late 90s/early 2000s and his dad is some kind of web engineer at his company. One day, the company decides they want to start hosting videos on their website, which given the timeframe, was a pretty new thing. They task my friend's dad with browsing other websites that host videos and gathering information about how they might implement such a feature themselves.

He gets to work browsing and notetaking and he quickly realizes something: at this point in the internet's life, most of the sites hosting video content are... adult in nature. Undeterred, our protagonist pushes on, browsing all manner of early internet erotica in the name of research.

After a week or two on the project, it occurs to the man that the IT department is monitoring everyone's browsing data, and he might need to explain to them why he's visiting all these sites on company time. He reaches out to IT hoping to explain himself, that he was tasked with gathering information on online video, and this is just the nature of where online video is right now, and I know it looks sketchy, but I swear, this is all work related.

He doesn't even get to finish making his excuses before the IT guy cuts him off with a reassuring "you're not even in the top 10."

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talexbatreddit@reddit

Heh. I have a similar story from the IT side.

Back in the summer of '99, I worked a contract at a small Ontario government site (about 50 employees) that was getting by on an ISDN line, which I think was 64K bandwidth -- so not a lot. The Internet was just starting to take off, so people were browsing a little, and you can imagine that with that many people, the poor little ISDN box was running flat out for most of the day. I was the Guy in the Server Room, so I was tasked to find out what was going on.

I had just started using Perl as a development language, so using that on the web logs was an entertaining task. All web requests were labelled with the user name, what URL they were requesting, and how big each request was. I was able to pull together some very interesting results.

It turned out that the Head Guy's assistant was a big fan of Manchester United, and would visit their site regularly. (His cubicle was covered in Man U merch, posters, a scarf, you name it.) He was using up something like 60% of the entire bandwidth available for the organization. Anyway, I put all of this damning information into a spreadsheet labelled CONFIDENTIAL and slid it, face down, to the head Operations person during a meeting.

They had a look at the information, and made a bit of a sour face, because this assistant was essentially untouchable, for political reasons. So they just struggled along, with their poor little ISDN service and crappy performance.

I was glad when that gig was over.

AStrandedSailor@reddit

Years ago as a product manager, I had to do research on female urination devices (SheWee, GoGIrl, WhizBiz) to decide which we would stock in our stores. I am glad I never had to explain some of the pictures, videos and forums that Google found for me.

ZirePhiinix@reddit

I'll like access to your research for researching purposes...

Asking for a friend?

wildwing@reddit

Your flair has me cackling in the car park at work like I have a wetware issue.

Thankyou. Sometimes our inner thoughts show the truth.

ac8jo@reddit

I worked at a consulting company in the late 90s-early 00s and we had a proposal to do for an agency in San Francisco. We got one of those warnings (through him) that they were finding too many people browsing unprofessional websites at work and to cut it out. He looked up from the memo and said "it was for the SF proposal, honest!" I'm not 100% sure if he was telling the truth or joking.

Another company I worked at, I was supposed to be the one monitoring, but IT was supposed to be 25% of my job so I didn't do it (I told people we had the capability and if they were concerned with what I'd see and report to leadership, they should view that stuff at home and on their own devices). About 4 years into it, a coworker and I are setting up for a meeting in the fishbowl (which had floor-to-ceiling windows going up 12 feet or so on the two longest walls, including one facing into the office). The idiot coworker, after connecting the projector to test it, brings up a topless picture of his girlfriend.

wiredcrusader@reddit

I feel like I might have been the IT guy in this scenario in real life. Was it an advertising company?

Casexcasey@reddit (OP)

This is unfortunately all I remember from when I heard the story ~13 years ago, and I lost touch with the friend in 2013 when I dropped out of college, but for the sake of comedy, sure, it was definitely an advertising company.

tepancalli@reddit

Even if it wasn't it's still funny lol

iacchi@reddit

About three years ago I was looking for resellers of a particular vacuum gauge. The model number started with JAV and then a bunch of numbers. Let's say I was quite surprised of the results I got from Google when I entered the model number in the search (JAV = Japan Animated Video as well, apparently).

Toratchi888@reddit

Or "Japanese Adult Video", IIRC...

Necrontyr525@reddit

that track hard, even today.

Busy-Marionberry-836@reddit

In the late 90's the company I worked at decided that everybody needed email and internet access. Great seems like a good idea.

As I went around configuring PC's and giving the C-level personnel a quick 'how to' talk one of the senior salesdroids was following showing how to find the 'interesting' sites and recommending a few of his favourites.

Needless to say my next recommendation was a decent firewall.

ratsta@reddit

Around the same time I was the email guy for a multinational household brand. We managed the internet for a few countries in SE Asia. The email server at one crashed one day and we found it had run out of disk space. Further investigation showed it was due to an abundance of large file attachments. We ran some stats and something like 95% were WMV files. Sure enough, a check of a dozen or so showed they were all pron as the cool kids called it back then.

This was problematic not just because it crashed our server but because it was a country with very strict religion and if word hit the media that employees were using the corporate email for distribution of such material, the marketing and communications people would've had their work cut out for them.

I contacted the IT manager and he just sighed. Over a few months we sent out multiple firmwide notices, no change. Eventually started contacting frequent flyers directly, advising them that their activity was in contravention of the acceptable use policy and was being reported to HR, etc. They'd reply, apologise profusely and beg that I didn't report them but sure enough, they kept on doing it. Talking about it with the regional IT manager, he said that it was cultural. If they could "get one over the man", i.e. promise to do something, not do it, and not get in trouble, it was a braggable victory.

It got to the point where we had reported the issue to HR and legal, both regional and HQ, and left them to decide how they were going to approach it. Sadly for this story, I left before they issued any instructions.

As your IT guy said, not even in the top ten!

Every-Reflection-974@reddit

I once worked at a department studying human identification by various body features. One student did a project on penile venous patterns - as this is a body part often seen in criminal content. She got dispensation to look at and capture lots of adult material.

HecateRaven@reddit

🤣