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carolinanadeau · 3 days

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This is a bit of a long story, but I promise all of the lengthy exposition is necessary to properly deliver the ending. This is the story of how, with no human intervention at all, technology played an elaborate prank on me.

So, today, I looked up a website on my work laptop in incognito mode, and something happened that I've never seen before - it was blocked for adult content by something called Sophos.

The website I tried to access is an extremely innocuous and obscure website that sells dolls (I am a doll collector), and absolutely no one could ever accuse it of containing even the tiniest hint of adult content. So even though I know I can defend myself against that accusation with ease, it's still an potential record of me doing something blatantly unrelated to work, and I start to freak out, wondering if the bosses will be alerted, if all my browsing history is perhaps being relayed to them. I need to know more about these Sophos.

As I frantically Google to find out if I could be in trouble, some of my worst fears are confirmed. This software doesn't track all of your browsing history, but it logs the incident if you attempt to access something blocked, and all of these events are viewable from a central database.

Now, I'm no angel when it comes to not screwing around on company time. Admitting to this doesn't paint me in a very good light, but I imagine not many people can afford to throw stones about this particular vice. In incognito windows on this work laptop, I've browsed Reddit and Tumblr, I've read stories on AO3, I've worked on my sometimes-NSFW fanfic. I'm a loser with a poor attention span, what do you want me to say? As long as my work gets done it's not the worst thing in the world.

So in addition to the fear for my good standing as an employee, I start to feel sick. What could the information contained in this software reveal? It could expose me as a serial timewaster - enough to get me reprimanded on its own, or worse - but it could also rub a lot of salt into that wound by revealing my very embarrassing niche interests to my bosses, making me look perverted in some way, or even the near-fatal humiliation of leading them to discover my fanfic somehow!!!

When I am able to find the Sophos application and open it, it's not as bad as it could be - there's no AO3 on there, no Tumblr or Reddit or Google Docs, nothing but the doll website that seems to relate to my personal interests - but it certainly doesn't look good. I scroll through the "event" log, and it's not just my attempt to access the doll website that is in there, but 18 events, and they all have my name attached! The bosses are going to see all of this! A large amount of them seem to point to Google Translate. Weird and unsettling but... doesn't necessarily sound like something bad if the bosses were to see it. But there is one event that sounds terrible, and it shows up repeatedly.

Apparently I tried to access something on "tse2.bing.explicit.net". That sounds damning. And when I look up that domain to find out what it means, my suspicions are confirmed. While there are certainly far worse domains that could show up in the incident log, this is undeniably bad.

I try to think this through. I've never deliberately used Bing for anything - not only that, but some of the logged access attempts included a day when I called out sick, a time 2 hours before my shift, and a time 90 minutes after my shift. If I ever got confronted about this, I could easily prove it wasn't really me. Whatever this is, it's not my fault. But just the same, it looks very bad.

(I even start to develop paranoid thoughts - were the events that occurred when I wasn't in the office somehow logged from my home laptop? Am I being spied on through my work Gmail account or something? No, of course, that makes no sense. Unless...)

I sit outside on my break, texting with my long-distance best friend just to vent about the horrible situation I'm in, feeling vaguely ill. Oh my god, should I just quit my job right now before having to face this humiliation? Should I just throw myself in the river?

One thing is for sure - I have to know what I'm up against. I have to know what this URL leads to when typed in, whether it's something that I actually did access myself, whether it could humiliate me utterly or whether I could say with confidence, "that wasn't me!" when I'm inevitably called to trial.

So when I go back to my desk, I sit and painstakingly type in the full URL to my phone browser, a long, long string of numbers and letters, because there is no way to copy and paste the text from the Sophos app. The first time I click "go", holding my breath... I get an error. I look over the string carefully like I'm doing my taxes, fix a missing digit... and get a different error.

I check each and every number and letter one by one, even making sure the cases match in case that makes a difference. Finally, after several minutes of trying, I get it exactly right.

And, dear reader, when the image loads, do you know what "explicit" image appears on my screen?

#imagine if this post got flagged for content lmao #also if you want a musical accompaniment for the punchline I invite you to imagine the stickbug song. or maybe Spanish Flea #this is like one of those joke ARGs except it just. HAPPENED.#my original post #long post #(also I still don't know where that image came from and I have no memory of searching for it but it WOULD be work-related!)

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