I’m actually shaking so much that this will probably not be a very good pit rant at all, but the horror of what just happened must be shared. I was sitting at my desk this afternoon, happily compiling information from the pages of useless work facts to the open excel spreadsheet in front of me. Yes, I had a few programs up, word, work email, and ‘The Straight Dope Message Board’ at the bottom of the screen. Yes, it is my guilty pleasure to do a bit of work and then read a bit of the fun, and the interesting that is this message board. I had become so focused in the paper before me that it took several ‘Heather’s to break through the fog in my brain.
It finally donned on me that a nice older male co-worker had arrived to chat, share work tidbits, or heck maybe even give me food, how was I to know? With a smile I turned to greet my co-worker, my eyes traveling over my desk: seeing the empty water glass, seeing the dust on my keyboard, seeing the excel spreadsheet open, seeing the blinking, flashing porn that had inserted itself in the middle of my screen.
Yes, that’s right. At work, on the center of my work computer.
NAKED WOMEN, sticking their breasts at me, opening their legs for me, and trying to draw my attention to a phone number.
With blinky lights surrounding them.
With a co-worker staring at it.
With a co-worker who HAD thought I was a sweet, innocent young woman, who now probably thinks I can’t get enough at home and am looking for this at work.
My heart stopped, my breath constricted and I clicked on the excel spreadsheet to hide that horrible, horrible thing. After ten minutes of the usual banter, he finally left and I deleted it as soon as I could stop the shaking.
Now, I KNOW the Straight Dope is not sending me this. I know that the Straight Dope doesn’t even HAVE pop up ads. Something is making this happen, and that something is evil.
And that something has crossed the line; it is now messing with my livelihood.
I don’t know about you, but even though I’m a young female who has never visited a porn site, my hotmail box is overflowing with porn Spam. I admit that, at home, I once visited an internet sex toy shop, and after that I did notice my hotmail account getting a lot of Spam for a balding older man needing a penis enlargement who likes women who like horses in the wrong way. I’ve accepted that my email was contaminated, but other than emptying the junk folder I didn’t pay them much attention. You see, I’m easygoing. I can put up with useless Spam (not even suited to my age/gender so they’re not even doing good research for this Spam), but this has crossed the line.
The problem is that I WLL PROBABLY GET FIRED FOR LOOKING AT THIS AT WORK. They won’t care that it’s a pop-up add, that I wasn’t at any naughty sites and that I have no idea why this is happening. The Porn has gone too far.
My questions for the ever wise people here…
- How can something pop-up while I’m stagnant at Straight Dope?
- How would something like this get on my computer?
- Has this happened to anyone else? I’m used to pop up ads when I change pages, but never just appearing out of thin air.
- Is this legal?
- How may I discover who’s sending this to me so I may hunt them down and pound my ‘letter opener of death’ into their sweaty, losery foreheads?
- Could they have put a program on my computer that does this? I ask because this started after I accepted a ‘You received an e-card’ in my hotmail in box. I noticed it installed something when I clicked on it (it said it was for my e-card), but no e-card arrived. I assumed it was because I had clicked wrong and the site was busy.
I want these people who are jeopardizing my livelihood to suffer. I want humiliation. I want embarrassment.
I want them to feel the shame I felt when I realized my co-worker thinks I look at porn at work. 
(I apologize for the poor grammar and spelling, and please move this if it should be somewhere else.)
