Your most ridiculous porn-related story

So what is it, as the title says?

One memorable incident for me took place about 3 or 4 years back. I used to work at an IT firm that handled the IT-related infrastructure of many airports scattered across the country. Some of these airports were located at really remote locations and would handle maybe one 15 passenger flight per day. You get the idea; small town airports staffed with townies who had never ventured outside their comfort zones.

Anyway, we always made sure to visit all the airports twice a year for routine checks, even if they never reported any issues. On one of my visits to one particularly notorious airport, which were fully staffed by men after some inglorious incidents involving female employees previously, I found that all but one of their computers were full to the brim with viruses and were simply unusable. They were using just one computer to perform passenger check-ins, selling tickets, handling cargo and even doing administrative work. They had conveniently forgotten to inform the IT department about this issue. They told me that the computers had been getting rendered unusable one by one since the beginning of the month. At once, my spider senses were tingling.

In accordance to procedure, I informed my supervisor about this, and he immediately set off to track their Internet usage. Predictably, he found that they had been accessing dodgy porn websites (including gay and fetish websites) and that the guys who worked during the graveyard shift were particularly culpable. When one computer became so teemed with viruses that it became unusable, they would simply shift to another, until the entire airport (albeit a tiny, shitty one, I must admit) was being run by just one computer.

My supervisor asked me to return back to base on the earliest available flight, and I did that. He told me to block their Internet traffic to all but their online reservation system and I did that too. The reason why we had allowed Internet traffic for them before was because they really had little else to do during the day. Perhaps they will find something productive to do using the Internet, we said. Yeah, right.

Later, the guy who was in charge of all the airports came to our department. He was absolutely irate! He asked us to provide him with a log of all the Internet traffic over that month, and his next phone call to the airport was legendary.

"Why the hell do you feel the need to watch gay porn on my computers?" he yelled. "If you want to watch porn, do it at home, don't touch anything in my airport with your cum-riddled hands!"

The airport guys later called me and told me that they were ready to file a sexual harassment charge against me.

Really, guys? I don't think you know how that works. Good news is, that didn't happen after the guy in charge flew over there and ripped them a new one.

 

Internet Things

Just kidding, Information Technology.