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That naked picture on my PC? Not mine. The IT guy put it there

So the IT guy took revenge by revealing the users's ugly browser history

ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday frolic through readers' experiences of being asked to sort things out in the office, or outside it and outside office hours.

This week, a pair of responses to recent On-Call stories in which readers confronted secret directories full of decidedly Not Safe For Work images.

Reader “Dave” told us about the time he worked at a financial services company and was asked to rebuild a PC.

Mere minutes into the job and Dave says “a picture of a lady in a compromising position” appeared.

Dave was “called over by the excited teenage build guy who couldn't believe what he had seen.” As a wise older hand, Dave told his underling to just delete the image and arranged for a quiet word to be said to the user when the PC was returned.

Said user was having none of it and declared “It must have been the IT guy who downloaded the image.”

“As you can imagine, this didn't go down well with us,” Dave tells us.

Oh yes, we can imagine that it is a very, very bad idea to traduce the IT guy.

Dave's story confirms our suspicions.

“By the time the guy had got back to his desk, his login wouldn't work,” Dave says. “He had to return his PC (which he wasn't happy about) as 'we must have missed a step.' As soon as it was returned, I then started work and the user's manager was subsequently presented with a list of the user's dodgy Netscape history and the names of some images in his cache.”

Dave didn't tell us what happened next, but it doesn't sound pleasant because he told us the consequences “Served the guy right for not accepting the slap on the wrist.”

Reader “Shawn” has a similar story. Shawn works “at a large multi-national corporation, in IT” and that was recently privileged to make the acquaintance of “a new manager, young and just out of college.”

Said manager had a problem with his laptop, so Shawn and his crew backed it up before trying to fix it.

That process took rather longer than expected, given that the chap hadn't been on the job for long so shouldn't have had much data to back up.

The cause? Shawn says “those types of files names started scrolling by.”

“Long story short, we felt obligated to report it. He had over 8GB of smut on his laptop, and even had them in the same My Pictures folder along side his wedding photos.”

Eeeew.

“Needless to say, he was terminated that day and walked out by our security folks.”

“Just goes to show, some folks can earn a degree, but still be as dumb as a rock. LOL.”

You'll get no complaints with that one, Shawn. I've got a degree and look how low I've fallen – Reg hack. So help me out by clicking here to send your tale of odd jobs you've been asked to do at odd times. Good 'uns will end up in future editions of On-Call, all appropriately anonymised of course. ®

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