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

"Teachable moments" for mom and kid

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

See, this brings out the sex educator in me. (I get phone calls from parents along these lines sometimes.) I guess first I'd figure out what I know about the parent-child relationship there - are they close? do they talk about stuff? And then go talk to her and say, Hey, I thought you'd want to know that he was using my computer and seems to have gone to this site. If he's looking at it, he probably has questions about sex, or about naked ladies, or about his own body..... Then it's in her lap, as a parent, to figure out how to approach him.

Unless she's the sort who might go postal: "MY beloved baby was looking at evil porn????" and will go off the deep end on the poor child. In which case, I probably wouldn't get him in trouble. But that's about the only case in which I wouldn't talk to her.