Back near the beginning of this century an executive compensation arrangement called Golden Parachute was popular. Basically it assured that an executive discharged for something like a merger would get enough money to soften the landing.
Well, back in the 1970s and 1980s the opposite arrangement was popular – using executive compensation to try to keep the executive from leaving the organization for greener pastures. This was called Golden Handcuffs.
About 15 years ago I had a client who was considering such an arrangement and wanted to know how prevalent it was. You can see where this is going.
The really surprising thing is that I was so used to the term Golden Handcuffs being a compensation arrangement that I was surprised that my Google search returned porn sites.
This may be the only G-rated example in the entire thread. A few years ago I decided to see what I could find out about my high school girlfriend. It only took a few minutes of looking through completely public sites to put together a trail that showed she and her husband had fallen on hard times, lost their home, and they were now in a mobile home park where she was the manager.
My answer to this is pretty bleak. I am a writer too. I started with Guantanamo Bay and fell down a rabbit hole of the worst kinds of prisoner abuses. I know more about the CIA torture program than I ever wanted to know, along with the appalling state of Texas prisons when it comes to sexual assault.
I researched this because I had a revolutionary protagonist with a history of imprisonment in a terrorist camp, the book deals with his trauma, and I wanted to get a sense of the kinds of things he might have experienced. Now I know.
I really don’t like to borrow experiences like this without being absolutely sure I’m not being exploitative, and I have since felt obligated to do something impactful to make a difference to the real people going through this, though I have not yet settled on what.
I just find it appalling what we allow to happen to people in captivity because for whatever reason we judge them unworthy of human dignity. I’m hoping in some small way my book can shine a light on this dark corner of humanity.
Former coworker in a government job where they did monitor what websites you visited at work. This guy claimed he was researching adhesives when he googled “bondage.”
He lost his clearance and his job in one fell swoop. I’m sure he regretted that search.
In a complete reverse of that, I was doing some research on small financial platforms and one of the companies’ websites I found was literally www.getnude.com . I notified my line manager AND my department head of this before I even clicked on it, just in case it flagged something in our IT department. It is entirely SFW, by the way (and rather boring, despite the name) and no IT flags.
Well, I have lots of regrets, but Internet searches ain’t none of 'em. I’ve come across some pretty horrid shit, but I just chalk it up to a learning experience. Just gotta be more selective with Keywords.
You guys must be going to a different Google than I am. All I saw was lots of stuff about the proper Portland airport and lots of images of Hammond-brand organs. Nothing sketch at all, and I don’t have safe search turned on.
Two decades ago, there was a lot of buzz about the new movie coming out: Pirates of the Caribbean. Folks here were talking about the new starlet, Keira Knightley, who I had never heard of. I was at work, and I Googled her name and clicked on the first link.
The image of Keira was one that, shall we say, her gynecologist might have taken. I instantly closed out and emailed our IT department that I had accidentally clicked on a porn link and was I in the IT doghouse? They said nah, it happens occasionally, don’t worry about it.
Similar situation. Someone I met on vacation as a young teenager in the early 1970s. Had a huge crush and we wrote to each other for about a year. Fast forward to about 5 years ago and I’m noodling around on the internet, “Huh, I wonder what ever happened to her…”
News reports of the trial for her brother killing her mother. He was drunk, hit her and she fell hitting her head on the coffee table. Yikes!
Some other searches for people I knew back in the day led me to conclude that the years have not been as kind to everyone.
First: Twenty-odd years ago I used to go the the UK medicines regulatory agency (MHRA) pretty often, which is how I came to know about a superb little curry house just round the corner from the offices. Staff used to go there so regularly that it was almost like an unofficial extra canteen. It was called…Hot Stuff; and it was almost a MHRA staff right of passage to innocently check out www - you get the idea.
And for myself? There is an excellently handy website - https://www.rote-liste.de/ [Red List] - which catalogs medicines available in Germany and provides information on them, which was extremely useful for my job at the time. However, it is extremely easy to inadvertently go to the Rote Buch [Red Book] website instead. On a work computer. That one cataloged German prostitutes instead.
