Sixty second hypothetical.

[rivka]

Your boss lets her nine-year-old son hang out in your office sometimes, when she's working in the evening or on weekends. When he's here, he uses your computer. (And never puts the mouse back on the left side, but that's beside the point.)

You have Internet Explorer set up to clear the history file every day, but IE also keeps track of URLs which have been directly typed in - you can access them from the address bar. One of the ways you can tell that your boss's son has been using your computer is that sites like cartoonnetwork.com and nickelodeon.com appear in the address bar menu. Okay. But one morning, nakedladys.com is right in there with the addresses for cartoon websites. You click on the link to make sure it's not an ironically-named site for kids. It's not.

You have no idea whether your institution monitors Internet usage for porn viewing, although it's pretty obvious that no one is checking to see how much time you spend on non-work-related sites in general.

Do you tell your boss? And if so, what do you tell her?

Comments

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

I may have told you once about going through my browser history and finding all some astoundingly raunchy (but very literate and charming) stuff and realizing with a smirk that my friend and co-worker was using the only fast internet connection in the office (mine) after hours. I casually mentioned to him, one day in the office, that he might want to clear his browser cache once in a while "because it stores all KINDS of things -- images, URLs, everything -- and heaven knows how much drive space that takes up." His eyebrows barely moved, but I didn't see any more raunch while I was there. Hope I saved him any potential embarrassment at home, too.

The point being, if you don't want to bring it up to the boss, a subtle hint to the kid, even in the form of a note about, oh, drive space and network monitoring, might make such things stop happening at your desk.