Really Embarrassing Moment with the Boss

[Christine]

Ok, am I the only one who is not getting a hand-wringing, pearl-clutching, "my-boss-is-a-horrible-person-because-he-looks-at-porn" vibe from this post? Just a "omg-this-is-a-hella-uncomfortable-situation" vibe?

My boss can look at porn until he is blue in the...face, for all I care, and it's not my business if he does it at work (although I hope to God he doesn't, since he is a school principal), but it would be extremely cringe-worthy (for me) if he knew that I knew.

It's funny how he immediately began watching the video after a conversation about calendar appointments...who knew?

I do, however, find this a very interesting first post.

I didn't get the "pearl clutching and handwringing" from the first post. It was the subsequent post where the OP stated that the boss, besides watching porn that day, was going on a double-date that night. At that point, I got a little bit of the hand-wringing vibe.

This is what she said:
What makes it even more awkward is according to his calendar, it says he is on a double date later tonight.

 

[tvguy]

This part I totally agree with. But that said, I am confident enough in my relationship with my boss that I would have brought it up to him and told him to watch what he was doing on my screen because it made me feel creepy and I don't appreciate his "cookies" impacting my pop-ups and searches. I'd also bring the incident up in case future IT work tracked the history on my computer so it would have already been established that it was him and not me because bosses can sometimes have a double standard for their own behaviour v.s. their employees, KWIM?

That would be a tough call. I could see where that would strain a relationship with a boss. Funny how Internet usage in the office has changed. When we first got Internet at work in 1994 , the ONE computer that could go on the internet on was in a central place where the screen could be seen by most folks in the office. You had to write on a clipboard every website you went to and why.
My wife's company tried blocking some sites for a while, but the IT guys got tired of getting calls to unblock sites for legitimate reasons that they removed the blocking.

 

[ronandannette]

That would be a tough call. I could see where that would strain a relationship with a boss. Funny how Internet usage in the office has changed. When we first got Internet at work in 1994 , the ONE computer that could go on the internet on was in a central place where the screen could be seen by most folks in the office. You had to write on a clipboard every website you went to and why.
My wife's company tried blocking some sites for a while, but the IT guys got tired of getting calls to unblock sites for legitimate reasons that they removed the blocking.

It does depend on the relationship with the boss, certainly. That's why I specified that if it were me, I would do it. And FWIW, my boss would already know I'd be weirded-out by it and would likely want to know he'd made the "error" so he could be more cautious in the future. I wouldn't assume he'd intended to expose me to it nor that he'd be cavalier about having done so. Again, we agree that the boss can look at whatever he wants because company time IS his time, but that doesn't make it super-professional or something that I'd be ready to shrug off as just another day at the office...

 

[Gumbo4x4]

Another thing to never Google? Beaver tattoos. Never dawned on me. I want to get a tattoo of a beaver, so was looking for ideas. Yep. Not doing that at work again...

In the very early days of Internet at work, we had one PC with Internet access we were all encouraged to tinker with on breaks. I usually searched for mud racing sites. I stumbled across a women's mud racing club & mentioned something about it to my wife. She wanted me to get more info, but I couldn't remember the web address. Their club was called "Dirty Women". Yeah, I really should have thought about that before I plugged that into the search bar....

 

[FlightlessDuck]

1) He should not even know your password to log into your computer. That security violation alone could get you both fired.

I can say with 95% certainty that her boss doesn't know her password.

 

[Bilberry]

I can remember a humorous "porn" incident at work. The boss's computer had a screen saver that would flip through family pictures every 5 seconds. One day a bunch of pictures scrolled through of an elderly woman showing her bare bum. We found out it was the bosses mother-in-law. She was in a nursing home, developed bed sores, and the pictures were taken for a doctor to look at. The boss had accidentally down loaded the medical photos. The poor woman! A few in the office jokingly accused the boss of trafficking in elderly porn.

 

[Magpie]

This thread is making me giggle.

The OP's boss has nothing on one of my former bosses. First day on the job, he says to me, "So, there's some pictures up on the lunchroom walls. Feel free to take down any that make you uncomfortable, and leave them on my desk." Curious, I headed downstairs, where I discovered that every spare inch of wall had been covered with centerfold girls. Including many taken from... erm, distinctly gynecological points of view. (Let's just say they weren't nice, tasteful Playboy centerfolds!) So, I shrugged and took down all of the ones that had me staring right up some lady's hooch. I figured I could live with the rest.

As I'm headed back upstairs, I get cornered by two of my coworkers. They wanted to know how many pics I took down. Or more specifically, "Are they all gone? Tell us you took them ALL down!" Then they chivvied me back downstairs to take down the rest of the boss's porn collection (except for two entirely inoffensive WWII bomber girls, who I left up because I actually liked them). As it turned out, the boss's porn collection was making everyone uncomfortable, but because they were all guys none of them felt that they could say anything about it. So they were incredibly excited when he finally hired a girl and they could get me to take them all down.

The next day, all the pictures were back up... on the walls of my boss's office! Fortunately, that's not where he did staff evaluations, so none of us had to see them.

(He was actually a pretty decent boss, porn addiction aside.)

 

[EmbarassedEmployee]

To the poster mentioning the awkward feeling that is exactly how I feel. I know a ton of guys who watch that stuff, and I don't judge.
But knowing that he likely knows I know he watches it is whats so odd.

 

[JoeA]

OP - you should leave a bottle of lotion and a box of Kleenex on your bosses desk with a little note letting him know what he did!

 

[lifesavacation]

I don't think it's a problem that the owner accessed the porn at work. He owns the computers and gets to set the rules.

It would be a problem, though, if a female employee inadvertently saw the obscene material and felt uncomfortable. In which case, the OP should speak up and let him know.