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

[brooksmoses]

You've got a wide range of serious answers, which I really don't have much to add to, so I'll make the necessary flip comment: 9 years old really isn't too young to learn about the budgies and the butterflies -- how, when two nouns that end in "y" love each other very much, they change their ending to "ie" before adding the "s" on the end to become a plural....

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was lovely. Thank you.