Did webcam 'performer' offer support chap payment in kind? Welcome again to a festive edition of On-Call, the column in which readers send stories of jobs gone bad and we sanitise them for general consumption. We usually appear on Fridays, but the On-Call inbox is bulging, there's sod-all news to write this week and so we're doing it daily this week to spread some Christmas cheer. …
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"It was too much like my gramma relating her sexploits."
An elderly neighbour had a long term lover until she reached 84 - and then he was starting to get a bit too frail. When she died just short of 100 she left a daily diary. Her daughter set herself the task of deciphering the juicy bits written in a form of Pitman shorthand.
The post-war Baby Boomers became teenagers/adults in the liberalising 1960/70s. They are now your "grandparents" - but are generally more healthy and physically active than previous or subsequent generations.
As you get older you find that your inner mental identity remains relatively fixed at some earlier age. It is particularly mirrors that remind you your face is leading the decline into physical old age.
I saw an old, somewhat rusted sign up on a wall at a more or less disused ex military airfield retained for Air Cadets to do gliding at about 20 years ago over what used was probably one the officers mess. It stated:-
ladies of negotiable virtue are not permitted on the premises.
-by order <the base CO>.
That took a few seconds to sink in at the age of ~14! I would think that Terry Pratchet probably saw a similar sign somewhere and popularised it.
I think "The Street of Negotiable Affection" appears in Sir Terry Pratchett's [The Colour of Magic] which was published in 1983 - the red light district of the fantasytown of the moment. The story's tourist takes a lot of fairly innocent pictures there but his portrait-box consequently runs out of flesh-tone paint.
Especially when it's someone high up.
I had to fix the PC of the MD of a car dealership which was riddled with bugs and running slow. Turned out he had a predilection for an particular anal sex website which was downloading crap onto his PC. He being the boss, machine was cleaned up and nothing said.
another senior manager within another company was investigated when her laptop started showing popups for shemale and granny pr0n. I had to investigate and found out she'd let her teenage son use the laptop at home. Would have liked to have heard that conversation when she got home.
Tech at work on the road all the time stuck in hotels. Opened up his laptop to show female CEO something, turns out the laptop had just gone to sleep with the lid closing, and so burst into life with the porn he had been playing the night before.
He went bright red, panicked and ran out of the building, the CEO just laughed.
Back in my helldesk days, had a desktop come in that was "running slow". I arrived right after it did, so I got there in time to see the porn splashscreen. Then the porn wallpaper, cycling through an unknown number of images. At some point, a porn screensaver. Shortcuts to porn sites splashed all over the desktop. At one point, something particularly nasty popped up and the female helpdesk tech just got up and walked out.
The computer was dubbed "The Pornado", and with time and retellings, has passed into the department annals.
That's the one you don't hand back to the user and keep around for when manglement show up demanding why they need to pay you so much.
The worst such case I've encountered is when I was asked to sort out a friend's PC after her son had been using it and managed to infest it with crapware - to find a rather large set of explicit pictures onboard, many featuring another friend's daughter.
Some things you just absolutely wish there was mind bleach for.
He being the boss, machine was cleaned up and nothing said.
I had a customer a while back that suffered repeated malware infections. They all came from the machine in the boss's office.
We ended up building him a dedicated Linux machine for his porn surfing - it was much cheaper that way...
Vic.
The PA to one of our board directors once downloaded some very naughty pictures of young men and decided to share it with her fellow secretaries around the company. Unfortunately for her, she accidentally emailed it to all the directors of the company instead.
Cue me frantically dashing around the company with her opening people's mailboxes and deleting the message.
Some my female colleagues in the 1990s were very vocal about any female "pin up" on their male colleagues' desks. However - they thought it perfectly ok to display a postcard from someone's holiday with the subject being a Greek/Roman "Priapus".
Got to love those double standards eh?
On topic of helldesk, I've *never* understood why people think browsing for this crap at work on on work PCs is okay... Boggles my mind.
Some my female colleagues in the 1990s were very vocal about any female "pin up" on their male colleagues' desks. However - they thought it perfectly ok to display a postcard from someone's holiday with the subject being a Greek/Roman "Priapus".
Got to love those double standards eh?
I have pointed this out in the workplace, the ladies bought me a copy of Nutz to read.
I have told this story a number of times before but its worth repeating.
A girl in the PMO was working from home and instead of emailing the monthly report to the entire project organisation (couple of hundred people) she attached a picture of her naked breasts taken on the laptop camera . . .
One of my friends is a teacher, a colleague of hers, a not unattractive female teacher in her mid to late 20's, once left a USB pen drive on her desk, in a class full of teenagers. Sure enough it vanished at some point during the day. But she didn't report it at the time for, because of its erm content. (I'm sure you can guess what type of pics were on there).
Anyway over the next few days, it was obvious something was going on with the kids at school (a secondary), more sniggering than usual while the kids were showing their phones around etc.
Eventually one of the teachers confiscated a phone in mid use, whist pupils were looking at pics of the said teacher in various poses. Turns out of course they were all passing the pictures around, and had been for a few days, and it turned out some of the parents found out as well.
She got suspended for two weeks, with pay, followed by a light telling off.
Even my friend (a female teacher) said if it had of been a male teacher, he'd have most likely been sacked immediately as a minimum, whereas she got off with basically some free holiday time, and a bit of embarrassment!
"Even my friend (a female teacher) said if it had of been a male teacher, he'd have most likely been sacked immediately as a minimum, whereas she got off with basically some free holiday time, and a bit of embarrassment!"
Nowadays, the children could, and probably would, have been arrested under revenge porn legislation...
> a not unattractive female teacher
As a teenager I was a very keen photographer. One lesson our teacher hadn't shown up and we had a relief teacher who just let us sit there and read. So I was reading through an article in Amateur Photographer, when suddenly the teacher came straight up to me and confiscated the magazine.
"You can have that back after school"
I was a little bemused, but found something else to occupy my time. After school I went to the staffroom to fetch my magazine back. Later that evening I think I realised why it had been taken away by this particular teacher. There was a lovely series of photos of her topless posing with some butterflies. I'd never have noticed it was her if she'd not brought it to my attention.
A girl in the PMO was working from home and instead of emailing the monthly report to the entire project organisation (couple of hundred people) she attached a picture of her naked breasts taken on the laptop camera . . .
Friends of mine used to run a fairly upmarket restaurant with a large mailing list of customers. Friends' 20-ish daughter had her nipples pierced one day, and then after an evening in the pub with her mates decided to use the flatbed scanner and send the image to her boyfriend. Drunken finger trouble ensued, and my friends awoke to find a considerable amount of not very impressed replies from their customers.
Wow adam52, nice way to try and slew the whole conversation, to your favour. Lets review what your describing as an analogy.
The "unannounced left hook" you described in relation to the first situation describes rape, and no actually I wouldn't believe it or not.
But while there your chatting and he shows you a few moves and yeah you have a little tussle. That is almost considered a normal healthy interest in something out of the ordinary.
It was unprofessional and unnecessary.
Some years back I did webdesign for quite a number of "Ladies of Negotiable Affections" and one of the main reasons they kept returning to me for more work was that I didn't "expect freebies" or try it on with them. Apparently most of the time, when people know what they do, any small task is expected to be repaid with a freebie. I always made the point that I expected to be paid in cash.
However, there were those times when it was offered as an extra that would have been rude to refuse - ahem!
Ah, those were the days...
>one of the main reasons they kept returning to me for more work was that I didn't "expect freebies" or try it on with them.
Exactly. If you are professional, warmly courteous and reasonably groomed (which some folk consider an extension of courtesy), ladies who are so inclined may take the initiative. If the ladies are not so inclined, then trying it won't get you anywhere anyway.
> Did you ask for cash up front?
50% upfront, 50% on completion.
The few times "extras" were offered were usually a little while later when they had benefited from the - ahem - extra exposure and were very grateful and happy. I didn't always accept, but there were one or two who were so... ahem, anyway where was I...
> So why is it acceptable to grope someone just because of what they do for a living?
As he described it, it was an accident. I did the same a month ago, hugging (and being hugged by) a friend goodbye - she was wearing a backpack and so to complete the gesture my hand had to be lower on her back than it normally would be, accidentally brushed her bum on the way to the small of her back. In no way could it have been mistaken for a grope, a grab or a slap, and she didn't appear to notice - even though I felt a small, inward pang of embarrassment.
It's no fun for me to touch any part of a woman she doesn't want me to touch, but if you're respectful and not bad looking many a woman may grab your hand and place it on her body. The thrill is in her expression of intent more than the tactile feeling. Intent is important.
Hugs don't always go smoothly - if I have facial stubble, it will sometimes catch on a woman's hair and pull some strands towards me as we part.
Then there is there is the question of whether to do two cheek kisses (the norm in France, Spain and other countries) or just one... we just have to go by context, and most of the time we get it right. Abashed giggles on both sides is usually the result if we don't. In some contexts, friends will kiss each other on the lips; I don't instigate it but some women (and men from some cultures) will.
We're strange creatures.
>"He tried a goodbye hug during which he “accidentally had a hand a little low”"
>>"Accidentally" on purpose, He copped a feel.
That very well may have been what happened. However, we can't infer it beyond doubt from the account that we have been given. M'lud.
It does seem that he should be docked style points for hugging a client just because of her line of work (though it might have been that her character and body language caused a young man to misread a situation), but to deliberately read his 'accidentally' as 'accidentally on purpose' doesn't prove a thing.
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