back to article Who was downloading smut in the office while eating ice cream?

Welcome back to On-call, our planned-to-be-fortnightly look at the things readers have been asked to do in the course of their employment, often at odd hours. This week, reader Guy* wrote to tell us about a gig he scored in the mid-nineties, where “my first task was to find out where all our bandwidth was going when the office …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

    An awful lot of articles about how women don't do porn would have, as it were, never come to fruition. (Though on the other hand someone named Dworkin could phone in a piece about how women's experience was manipulated by the patriarchy. Was it Ben & Jerry's?)

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

      "An awful lot of articles about how women don't do porn would have, as it were, never come to fruition. "

      Anyone who believes that never worked in a video store (I did in the 80s whilst a student)

      Women rented about twice as much porn as men and gay male porn was surprisingly popular.

      1. h3

        Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

        I think I would have just said "Well you know what happens next ...." or something like that.

        Don't think I would have reported it or anything.

        (Now probably the way things work is I would get fired for sexual harassment due to the comment. So I don't think I would which is stupid but true)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

        "Women rented about twice as much porn as men"

        This just suggests they hadn't worked out how to download the stuff. It's just evidence of the IT gender imbalance.

        1. h3

          Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

          In the 80's ?

          I don't know of anything that could display it properly in wide use.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

            There were these things called newspapers, before Rupert Murdoch came along. I'm so old I can remember when the Times was worth reading and the Sunday Times published interesting articles about modern life.

            1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

              Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

              when the Times was worth reading and the Sunday Times published interesting articles about modern life

              LIES!

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

            Let's see, there was an interesting case (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. - Supreme Court, 1984) decision which would support the notion of people owning VCR's. True, porn was more limited in the '70's but even then porn was available on reel film. Mass distribution was a bitch though.

  2. Martin Summers Silver badge

    IT Porn

    I thought I was on the wrong site for a moment reading some softcore IT Porn story. More of this kind of thing! :-)

  3. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    Shame that she felt she could not come back to the job. He should really have just given her a stiff talking-to so she could come clean and not be interfering with the company's download jobs, those that ought to have been in-hand at that time of the evening.

    1. gurugeorge

      Hahaaaaa Best ever comment!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Elementary, my dear Watson

        We had a similar issue back in the early 2000s but with better logging capabilities. Kept getting consistent virus infections and alerts on a public workstation with a guest login. However they were always occurring after office hours so Joe Public clearly wasn't to blame. Analysis revealed mucho porn and warez links etc. in the logs. Many people worked late as it happened, so it wasn't easy to figure out.

        We then discovered (by matching up access card logs over time) that only the building concierge's movements showed any regular correlation with the incidents.

        Solution? Easy. We created a separate VLAN and segment for the suspected villian and stuck the workstation downstairs in his office. Safer and a lot easier to monitor as well. The first time it pinged me with a virus alert was in the middle of the afternoon, so I took a stroll down to Jose's office wondering if it would be like Guy's spoon scene. Nope, Jose was busy working away on some paper stuff. His 16 year old son however was very busy on the keyboard. Mystery solved and the problem disappeared after a private chat with his father.

    2. Martin Summers Silver badge

      I think there's scope here for a Reg creative writing contest for someone to finish off (so to speak, cough...) the story in a SFW way.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. ecofeco Silver badge

      Paul Crawford for the WIN!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Had something similar at a company I worked at in 1997. We had several PCs set aside for lunchtime browsing while regular desktops had no access to the Internet. Working late one night, I decided to go to the canteen and get a coffee. Wandering past the open plan part of the office (us programmers were hidden from public view in our own room) I heard a sound. On closer investigation I found an intern from the engineering dept sat in one of the Internet browsing booths and "relaxing in a gentleman's way". He did a runner clutching his trousers around his waist, but had the brass neck to reappear at work the next day as though nothing had happened. He was asked to leave a few weeks later though, having been caught stealing half the RAM from some desktop machines ...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      re: Stealing RAM

      In the late 90s, when RAM was way more expensive (and less diverse !) I had a 512Mb machine at home. All our work machines were 4Mb.

      A colleague left, and was not immediately replaced. His machine sat there, unused for a few weeks.It seemed a shame to ignore it, so one evening, when everyone had gone, I popped it open, and swapped two sticks of RAM (2Mb) for my RAM (512). I figured missing RAM might cause a stink,. But incorrectly fitted RAM ? Happened a lot.

      A few weeks later, the new employee started. Went to turn on the machine, and it had *NO* memory - someone else with less caution than me had swiped the lot.

      I had to smile to myself when I imagined them realising they only had 2.5Mb, not 4 ....

      1. Stoneshop

        Re: swapping stuff

        Way, way back I had just gone from being a poor student to being a poor underpaid AV service technician, with a "company" (harhar) that initially didn't even have its own tools and test gear; I was asked to bring in mine to help start things. At some point however I did manage to get the owner to buy me some necessary stuff, and my own kit went home again.

        Roughly a year after I had come in, the "company" (harhar) was left without its manager as well as its customers, and by the look of it whatever inventory there was was set to end up in boxes to be forgotten in a dark corner of some attic, if not thrown out in the skip.

        The Belzer pliers and wire cutters that I swapped for my no-name ones still serve me well. I consider them compensation for having to bring my own tools those early months.

        Actually, I should also have taken the Weller, as well as the 'scope.

  5. Tromos

    Fifty shades of vanilla

    I too vote for encores.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fifty shades of vanilla

      On monitors used at that time it was probably sixteen shades of amber.

  6. chivo243 Silver badge
    Pint

    hmmm

    who wasn't may be the better question?

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: hmmm

      Indeed. As the apocryphal survey found out: 90% of men masturbate and 10% are liars.

  7. x 7

    without photos it never happened......

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. x 7

      "eating ice cream and touching herself with the spoon"

      More importantly, was the spoon full? And was it cherry flavour?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Metal or plastic spoon???

      There is no spoon...

      1. Suburban Inmate
        Angel

        Re: Metal or plastic spoon???

        I've found a spoon, sir!

        Well done sergeant!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's all fun and games...

    Until you come across a pc that has a boatload of extremely illegal crap on it...

    I used to be a systems administrator for a small collection of schools when one day I decided to upgrade all administrative pc's with a new anti-virus package.

    One particular computer caught my attention because the amount of free space on the drive was extremely low, so after a quick search revealed a hidden directory within the "tempory internet files" directory full of pictures of grown men having sexual intercourse with young children, I decided to take a small trip to the local police station during my break.

    After a long talk with a police officer it was decided that I should take no action and tell nobody for the time being and just continue to gather evidence.

    So after verifying that it indeed was this one particular person who was responsable for this and making copies of proxy-logs and everything the police finally came round to take the computer, proxy-logs and an external harddrive as evidence.

    The guy was arrested the very same day, management and other colleagues were pissed at me for weeks because I didn't tell them what was going on until it was too late...

    Turned out that not just this guy but also 3 other people within the organisation (including 2 members of said management) have been sharing this crap amongst themselves for years !

    I'm glad I don't work there anymore...

    1. Anonymous C0ward

      Re: It's all fun and games...

      Too late? Surely the first time is too late?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's all fun and games...

      Good on you mate. Porn with kids is sick and needs to be rooted out. You earned your wings there.

      I remember another story (there are so many) that occurred on my watch.

      Got a virus ping at lunchtime (which is when I can actually get work done). I remotely connected to the infected box for a quick look and saw the Office manager (or whoever was using his PC at least) hurriedly try to close a browser window connected to a site called rentboy.com. Being of a naturally paranoid, BOFH disposition, I immediately did a screen capture. This was immediately followed up by a phone call. Yep it was him. Three months later he was canned for embezzlement and then imprisoned. I sleep OK too.

  10. frank ly

    I found the IT crowd's porn stash

    Many years ago (about 1996), I would pass away rainy lunchbreaks by exploring the company network by doing directory traversals, up from where I was to where I probably wasn't supposed to go. (As someone who wasn't an 'IT person', even I was amazed at how lax that was.) One day I found a stash of soft-core porn (beach 'n' bikini and some lingerie stuff) in a mapped drive that seemed to be an IT function area. I quickly got out of there and made a mental note never to go there again.

    A short time later, word went round that people were using too much space for personal files and it had to stop (e.g. personal letters, domestic spreadsheets, etc.) Individually they may not have been much "but it all adds up you know and it's really not what you're here for", as the local IT manager told us with a wagging finger.

    I quietly told him, "I'll delete my spreadsheets and Visio drawings when the hundreds of Megabytes of soft-core porn is removed". He said "What?!", so I took him to my desk and showed him the collection. He made snorting noises and stormed away. The porn cache had gone by the next day and I was never asked to delete my 'personal' files.

    1. Stevie

      Re: I found the IT crowd's porn stash

      No argument about the inappropriateness of what you found and much kudos for the way you dealt with it, but since when did beach bikini and lingerie photos become "soft-core porn"?

      When I were a lad, that label was stuck on "Emmanuelle" and similar fare.

      I never asked what it was stuck on with, of course.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I found the IT crowd's porn stash

        when I was a lad it was Kay's Catalogue!

        I remember back in about 83/84 I was 13/14 finding a copy of Rassle stuffed in a hedge. That mag kept me and my mates going all summer holidays!

  11. Unicornpiss
    Paris Hilton

    Similar experiences..

    In 2002 I worked a job supporting POS equipment. (both point-of-sale and the other accepted definition for this acronym are true) My counterpart that worked in the corporate office taking care of the meager network there kept finding many, many connections in the log files to multiple porn sites, including some really sick stuff. Since this had not come up before, she didn't have any sort of logging in place to determine who the culprit was other than general logs as to what the internet gateway was being used for. So she embarked on a campaign to try and catch the person in the act, but couldn't find anyone doing anything they shouldn't be. (yes, there are better ways) She was further stumped by the fact that the porn sites were being accessed at random times throughout the day, not just at lunchtime, after hours, etc. Finally, she managed to finger the culprit. (no pun intended) It turned out to be none other than our CEO and part owner, who apparently had nothing better to do with his day than randomly surf porn in his private office.

    I never did find out if she confronted our CEO, but she did manage to block further transgressions by the simple method of remotely editing the hosts file on his machine to point all of his favorite sites to 127.0.0.1. Incidentally, the company filed for bankruptcy and was broken up about 10 years ago

  12. Martyn 1

    During the war....

    When I first started work there was no Internet, and nobody in the company had anything that could be called a PC, they were just dumb VT100 terminals, so the only porn was a stash of jazz mags which we kept hidden under the floor in the computer room, in the same place we used to keep the beer (really!) being right by the underfloor blowers for the AC units kept it nice and cold ;-) .

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: During the war....

      I see what you did there.

      Upvoted.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: During the war....

      happy days

  13. x 7

    For a few years I worked in the call centre for a once well-known UK PC builder (long since bankrupt). Getting machines laden with kiddy (or other illegal) porn back for repair happened on a weekly basis, sometimes more often - and the police were routinely informed.

    The machines would be taken away for forensic investigation, and when customers called chasing repairs they had to be stalled. Their accounts were flagged in such a way that calls were discretely handed to me, or one of my managerial colleagues, not by the front line teams. It was often very difficult to hold conversations with these guys when they were demanding urgent return of their PCs as it was imperative not to give the game away.

    What I could never understand though was how naive these people were - sending the machines in for repair with this filth on them - and often requesting that we back it up / restore it before working on the machine. In many cases we wouldn't otherwise have noticed it as standard policy was to nuke all machines upon arrival to reduce the chance of personal data leakage,.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      (or other illegal) porn

      But ... how would you know?

      Unless you were working in one of the Republics of Integristic Control, of course?

      1. x 7

        "(or other illegal) porn

        But ... how would you know?"

        you don't have to be an expert to recognise violent rape / bestiality / extreme torture / extreme violence / butchery / snuff movies for what they are......and I do mean extreme

        I'm not talking about acting - often this stuff looked "for real". Vomit inducing

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fastest way to prompt PC repair

    Always found that the fastest way to cut thru the queue and get my corporate laptop repaired promptly was to ask the desk agent (with no level of concern in my voice) 'Can you save my porn collection?' when attempting to schedule a repair. Works brilliantly every time and the laptop's hard drive is nicely checked for any defects or the laptop is sporting a brand new drive when I get the call to come pick it up.

    Note: Not a good approach if there is really porn on your computer. Just sayin'

  15. Montreal Sean

    inquiring minds want to know.

    What flavour was the ice cream?

    Chunky monkey? Late night snack?

    Please don't say Phish Food.

    1. skeptical i
      Devil

      Re: inquiring minds want to know.

      Rocky Road sounds like how this episode ended, minus the nuts.

      Fudge Swirl would be another fetish.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You guys finding it must surely go raking for it??

    Done IT support for two decades. Worked in large corps, a council, in umpteen schools, 30+ SME's. Also done private work on laptops belonging to all kinds of people. No idea the number of computers I've looked at, servers upgraded etc - must be in the thousands..

    "Dodgy" porn stumbled over - NONE.

    Was I just not nebby enough going looking for it?

    1. Anonymous C0ward

      Re: You guys finding it must surely go raking for it??

      Worked for an IT refurbishment company for a while. Never saw any porn either. There probably was some, but it all got nuked.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You guys finding it must surely go raking for it??

        > Worked for an IT refurbishment company for a while. Never saw any porn either.

        You mean on the refurbished computers, yes?

    2. Ian 55

      Re: You guys finding it must surely go raking for it??

      Where I used to live, people would stick old PCs on the pavement for others to take as a sort of freecycle thing.

      Not once did the hard drives have any porn or banking details on...

  17. John Sanders
    Pint

    Who cares about porn....?

    When I was on-call none of the guys in the rota were supposed to go to the pub, yet we were all drunk pretty much all the time while we were on-call.

    Irresponsible? Yes of course, those were more civilized times, before the empire... :-P

  18. OzBob

    in the 90s in a government department

    the ex-husband of a friend's sister was busted downloading extreme porn (kiddies, animals, father-rapers etc) in a government department. So not only was he fired from a great height (no generous pension, criminal record etc) but he had a very common name (there were 3 other people in the department with the same first and last name) so they had to publish his middle name in the media. When I mentioned it to his ex-wife, she laughed and wasn't surprised. Bullet dodged there by her methinks.

  19. Mark 85

    It could have been worse....

    Doing a late night upgrade and I walked into the darkened lunchroom for coffee. Here's the unmistakable sounds of delight coming from the back corner. After quietly leaving so as not to cause interruptus I perused the door logs. A VP and one of the other VP's admins.... Never said a word about it.

    I have heard that (I didn't work much longer.. bigger and better things came to pass) that the day after she quit, a small metal plaque appeared on the table designating the "XXXX XXXX Memorial Joy Table". Rumor has it from a friend that it was their "regular table"...

  20. RainbowTrout

    ancient history

    In the mid 90's when I was in grad school at a London medical school the admins freely admitted browsing the pron alt.binaries usenet groups.....

    On leaving the UK and moving to the US and finally getting into the pharmaceutical industry I would hear these stories about why web filters had been put on all of the machines.... It turned out a low-level scientist was caught viewing porn in his cubicle not once but on 3 separate occasions..... The first time caused "counselling", the second was more counselling and web filters. On the 3rd offense he a proxy and that caused his firing...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: ancient history

      > On the 3rd offense he a proxy

      He was watching porn on behalf of someone else?

      1. Havin_it
        Paris Hilton

        Re: ancient history

        Yeap, then he accidentally all the porn.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Related RFCs

    RFC 7462 has just been submitted to the IETF as an addendum to the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It defines a device, format and protocol agnostic specification of flesh tone compression in data streams. A recent traffic analysis study shows an expected bandwidth improvement of up to 1570% can be expected, if the protocol is enabled at its highest rate of flesh tone compression effectiveness.

    RFC 7463 is more controversial as it seeks to define unused bits in the standard TCP/IP packet headers to compactly encode well known storylines for 'executive' content: e.g. Bit 13 being set indicates that a plumber will be visiting two sisters on a very hot day because their washing machine has broken down, whilst bits 10-12 define in seconds, how long the plot line needs to be applied to the data stream before everyone involved gets right down to it with vigour.

    The big national and international telecoms infrastructure suppliers are keen advocates, realising that if RFC 7462 and RFC 7463 are accepted and universally embraced, then there's no reason at all for them to invest in faster technology, upgraded cabling and so forth. BT has recently enabled flesh tone compression in their home hubs, but have so far failed to successfully implement RFC 7463, worrying that customers will contrast the plot lines the RFC encodes with the irrefutable fact that no BT engineer has ever managed to come on time or deliver any sort of satisfaction.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Things readers have been asked to do

    It's been asked on more than one occasion for me to do some work. The horror...

  23. Elmer Phud

    Sharing

    Used to do admin for small group of managers while at a telecomms company.

    One of them would get an email with an iffy pic and a virus and then share it with his orkers, knowing full well that his machine was now infected.

    They were such a bunch of 'hoilier than though' twats that this was not a rare occurrence and they raised job to have thier machines sanitised. Demanded highest priority as they were all managers.

    When the pattern of infection was recognised and logs looked at, the 'faults' were given lowest priority and, if they argued, our boss would have a 'word' with thier boss -- reminding him that even minor deities are supposed to adhere to the rules.

    (I can't possibly comment on how the techies were busy on service lines with 'fast' modems and bulletin boards)

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Side benefits!

    At a stroke, the mysterious fish supper aroma disappeared overnight.

  25. Ian Johnston Silver badge

    He fixed the ethernet cable?

  26. Nash

    this reeks....

    of BS...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: this reeks....

      Yep, it fits into the category of workplace myths, there are many variations that seem to depend on location and culture.

      Then again I've seen stuff that fits into the workplace myth category, never reported it myself so I too wonder if it isn't just BS when others seem rather thrilled to claim to have witnessed such things.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: this reeks....

      It sounds eminently believable to me. Apart from my own experience of finding an intern having a strum at work, there's also an incident that occurred at the place my partner works. In the mornings they kept on finding office chairs with damp patches on them. Security were asked to investigate, and eventually caught a cleaner who was in the act of spaffing his man milk all over one of the chairs.

  27. Juan Inamillion

    Personal pr0n

    Corporate pron is all very well and I've seen a bit (well, the directories you understand...) in various offices. But one instance that springs effortlessly to mind didn't involve a corp or, really speaking, pron.

    My client was a semi-celebrity food doctor who ran his business from a home office with 2 staff. One time I was booked in to upgrade his system and applications, all on his MacBook Pro. Everything went fine and as I nearly finished he came in and asked how it was going and to make sure his large iPhoto collection was ok. I assured him all was well and to demonstrate opened iPhoto. As the library update bar nudged it's way across the screen I explained that the library was being updated to the latest version. As it completed the photo that came up full screen was of his naked wife spread-eagled on a blanket...

    Luckily I have very quick reflexes and with my hands hovering over the keyboard I managed to close the window super quick... I think we both knew what happened but I glossed over it by saying 'and of course your email will be updated in a similar fashion...'

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ahhh

    But how many of us are guilty of downloading porn at work (especially before commercial broadband) but having the knowledge to not be caught?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: ahhh

      "But how many of us are guilty of downloading porn at work (especially before commercial broadband) but having the knowledge to not be caught?"

      You mean, by plugging your unix laptop to the external DMZ direct, outside of any proxy control ?

      LOL. Yeah, I've seen this indeed :-)

      Anon, cos I don't want to be linked with him.

    2. 's water music

      Re: ahhh

      But how many of us are guilty of downloading porn at work (especially before commercial broadband) but having the knowledge to not be caught?

      Asking for a friend?

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I got busted downloading pron many years ago, while I was still working in the guise of a radio station sound engineer. I pretty much had free reign over what I did on the internet... Until one weekend I set and go a huge peer share download and went home for the weekend. The application ate all of the bandwidth and the radio station spent 1/2 the weekend without even email.

    Stern verbal warning.

    Whoops. The things we learn the hard way.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Camera Fun

    I remember in the early 90's working at the local Art College. We had a small suite of about 20 PC workstations, a large format printer, A3 scanner etc all crammed into a hot sweaty room which regularly hit about 30+C with all those large CRTs (so yes lots of scantily clad girls in the room and lots of eye candy for us lecturers). But this story is about the girl who one day had problems uploading images from her digital camera (in those days there were no universal drivers for such devices - it was busy in the run up to end of year Degree Show - so she left the driver install disk for me to put onto one of the workstations over lunchtime - and for that ofc you needed the camera.

    Well lets just say the install went fine and then the images starting importing - OMG - I had to quickly disconnect the camera (since there were other students in the room) and well the first 30 or so images coming in were all featuring the said little dark haired student doing a striptease with another girl and then some bloke joining in. Needless to say I had to import the images onto my office PC (yer purely for interest - cough) - then invite her in to the office to delete the ones she didn't want because the workstations all shared common disk space on the server. The look on her face was a priceless mix of shock and embarrassment judging by the colour she went. OFC I left her alone to do the editing part in the office - before suggesting it would be prudent to delete images before bringing the camera back into college and asking staff to 'help out' with your imports. I was sworn to silence for the price of a pint at the end of year, and made sure the images never made their way onto our server backups.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Camera Fun

      Well handled, Sir.

      FWIW, it's really common for girls to take nude pictures of themselves (or ask a friend to). Sometimes the excuse is that it's for sharing with their boyfriends, but I reckon in reality they just want to have a memento of when they looked all nice and pretty. Either way, it's nothing that should cause embarrassment but of course you wouldn't want that all over the network, so indeed well done in your case.

    2. x 7

      Re: Camera Fun

      " I was sworn to silence for the price of a pint"

      bloody cheap given the circumstances. I'm sure you could have come to a more satisfying ending

  31. Medixstiff

    Email fun

    The last place I worked, one of my roles was to go through the IronPort email appliances for quarantined emails and if required release them.

    Apart form the usual outside people emailing PowerPoint files of naked ladies doing all sorts of things to themselves or blokes, there were some really interesting emails with all the gossip one could want on their fellow staff members.

    One such email I sent to HR and my Manager as it was quite interesting. Then with their approval I did up a company wide email to all staff, it went along the lines that whilst email was company owned and we allowed staff to use it for some personal use, staff members really don't need to know personal information relating to other staff members and therefore it would be wise to send personal emails from home from now on.

    The email that caused all the fuss was from the wife of the state sales manager going on about how she saw him go into a hotel with one of the younger female sales staff on multiple occasions and she was filing for divorce.

    Now six months earlier this woman had sent some naked photo's of herself to her husband - they were both from Brazil and she looked great for a woman in her mid 40's - so I talked to him about it at the time and recommended she SMS stuff to him instead.

    The other thing I found interesting was that the female sales staff member was fired a year or so later - I had left by then - after she hooked up with a druggie, took drugs herself and was found to have been taking out laptops from stores and selling them to pay her habit.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Old school: 16mm black and white film

    The first proper job I had (1972) was at a small media company run by two brothers. Their old man had started the company years before but he died shortly before I joined.

    One day some of the lads told me about his porn stash. Apparently the brothers had to raid his loft and retrieve said collection before their newly widowed mum had a chance to look up there. The boxes of 16mm black and white smut were taken back to base and kept in a cupboard in the workshop.

    Much of it had deteriorated and just fell apart as it went through the gate but they rescued as much as possible and edited it into one reel. It was more of a comedy when they had finished. Shots zoomed into "certain areas" and when it pulled back it was a different two (or three or four) people.

    It was proper vintage porn. Normal shaped people and no deforestation. And talking of trees, those buzzy plastic toys you see today were then made of carved and polished pine. Seriously old school. Adds new meaning to "got wood?"

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