Porn and the Workplace

While I'm still thinking about my experience at Stentor, the topic of porn comes up. Yeah, I know! The Internet was slowly arriving throughout my career. When I started in 1983 computer to computer communication was...rather primitive. Generally all communication was done through lines leased from telephone companies, or, as it was called: hardwired. I took a computer course at Carleton University in 1984 and I was able to log into my account at the university from home via an acoustic coupler. This was a device that plugged into a keyboard and monitor (personal PCs were still extremely rare and expensive at the time). Then a telephone handset was placed in the receptacles on the coupler. By stuffing towels around the area where the headset and coupler met, I was able to communicate at 200 BAUD--with a lot of errors. I'd go to Carleton early before my class and go through my programs. When lines of code would not compile I knew that the coupler had transmitted noise and so I'd delete the line and type it over.

A year or two later, at Energy, Mines, and Resources, we linked one of my VAXes with an IBM mainframe at the University of Ottawa through dedicated telephone lines. From the U of O we could exchange messages  with other computers. Generally, it was a university to university and scientific network. There was also a military equivalent. Interest Groups were starting to form, though they were all text-based. You could subscribe to a group and add your comments to the discussion and receive a file containing all the previous day's comments every morning.

Ten years after my Carleton experience, the Internet was starting to come into its own. PCs had replaced dumb terminals and keyboards in the workplace. There was something called FreeNet in Ottawa--a cost-free Internet portal. Internet Service Providers (ISP) just weren't around. Personal Computers were still expensive. But, between the time I had linked our first VAX with the University of Ottawa's mainframe and I worked at Stentor, an all-text Internet had morphed into an image-based Internet. Internet Porn could now come into its own. PCs in the work place were soon beeping every time a user clicked on a new porn image.  At Stentor, it was an obsession. The system manager, a female Stentor employee, and the contracted system manager (JackSys, remember him?) spent their days together as JackSys downloaded image after image. I could overhear their comments. Things like, Oh look, you can see his thing! and Hey, look at those knockers! Real mature professional workplace behavior.

Of course I looked at it when back at my office--but never at a client site. I stopped abruptly when I realized that everything I typed and saw on my computer could be recalled and reviewed by anyone in the computer room where the communications servers were located. Still, after all those years and experiences, I've seen employees looking at porn when at work as recently as a year ago. To me, cruising porn sites on an employer's computer is like masturbating in public. Just a wee bit uncomfortable as well as unethical.

When I think back on all the ugly things that JackSys did during the time I knew him (and there is much, much more to tell), the one image that comes immediately to mind is of him sitting in a client's office, the middle-aged female employee looking over his shoulder giggling like a six-year-old. And, to top it off, he tried to take credit for the work I did while he was collecting obscene images.