Viewing Pornography at the Office

Last Friday, as I was wandering around the cubicles, I stopped by the pod of a fellow who does some metrics dashboards for the group. A few days before, there'd been a particularly relevant Dilbert comic about the use and abuse of key metrics that I wanted to share with him. I started telling him about it.

He wasn't sure if he'd seen it yet, so I told him to look at the online archives at Dilbert.com.

"Dilber.com?" he asked.

"Yeah, Dilbert.com," I said, not quite grasping the enormity of the mistake I'd just made.

He typed in the URL, and as the page began to load, I saw that he'd left the "t" off.

The page started rendering, and I started to say, "Wait, that's not the right URL," when what I should have done was:

1. Reach over.
2. Hit the escape key.
3. Physically interpose myself in front of the screen.
4. Turn off the monitor.
   

I should have done this, because a second later, we were staring at four pairs of tits (and their respective owners) on a porn site.

Of course, it couldn't have be one of those porn sites with a legally disclaimed, "Click here if you're over 18 and this content isn't obscene under your community standards" text-only splash screen. Oh, no. This was the real deal.

Though I guess I should be happy the models were only half-nude. I guess you have to apply some restraint when you're typosquatting such a popular site.

Here is a re-creation, with the relevant Dilbert panels strategically superimposed over the naughty bits:

It was even worse than this screenshot indicates, since the monitor we were using was a 17" LCD flatscreen with a higher vertical viewing area. Which meant more breasts.

Being a staid, slightly older, reserved, buttoned-down, family-oriented man (basically, the kind of guy you want doing a dashboard of key metrics), he made an "Oh my" kind of exclamation and closed the browser window, as I made my own futile apologies.

It was kind of awkward.

It also greatly diminished the comedic impact of the comic, which was unfortunate, since it was a pretty good one (if you've ever dealt with any kind of metrics dashboards).

Tags: accidental pornography, dilbert, key metrics dashboards