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

Re: Sixty second hypothetical.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

first off: nobody uses my computer without permission, and that goes for my work computer as well. if other people need to use my machine, my work better pay for a multi-user OS, and then we can create separate logins for people. if the boss wants her son to play on my computer that's fine, but that better happen to be separated from my work, so he can't accidentally destroy anything. who cares about porn; all my work, my research is on that machine!

aside from that, it would depend a lot on what my relationship is with the boss. but i'd be disinclined to tattle on the kid, since i don't see anything wrong with looking at naked ladies, and i don't know any child who won't, sooner or later, be interested in that. and i'd especially not talk if it's only one site -- like somebody else mentioned, it could have been a false lure that got him there. i might modify my response if the site is particularly nasty, and i consider it damaging without somebody talk about it to the kid, but again, much depends on my r'ship with the boss.

i might talk with the kid, actually, and ask that he please leave my workplace the way he found it, and teach him about browser cache clearing.