CNN reported this morning that Security and Exchange
Commission employees diddled while the economy burned.
Documents obtained by
the news outlet show that the Inspector General managed to verify that 33 SEC
employees were downloading porn on their computers, in clear violation of the
federal ethics rules. One staffer apparently downloaded so much porn, he was
unable to keep it all on his hard drive and had to burn CDs and DVDs of the
stuff, filling several boxes with the material. This was happening as the
economy was falling apart and no one was minding the store.
It’s apparently also not just boys being boys:
“A regional office staff accountant tried to access
pornographic Web sites nearly 1,800 times, using her SEC laptop during a
two-week period. She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on the hard
drive of her laptop.”
Several things come to mind (pardon the pun) when reading
this:
First, there’s something wrong with folks who are that porn
obsessed that they can’t stop watching, downloading and hoarding porn when they
go to work. We’re not talking about people who got an email from a friend,
opened it and saw it was porn and deleted it. We’re talking about people who
had BOXES of porn because they ran out of DRIVE SPACE. How do you explain that
to your coworkers? “Hey, Bob, what’s with those 8,500 DVDs over there?” “Uh…
Home movies!”
If you work 8 hours a day and you sleep 8 hours a day, that
leaves 8 hours of complete free time for you to go home, log on and lube up. I
don’t know anyone who has ever said to me, “Doc, I jerk off about 8 hours a
day, but I’m just never done. It’s like I just can’t clear the mechanism…”
Second, most places of business vary on their level of liberality
when it comes to what you can do on a computer. Some places block sites like
YouTube and Facebook while others are pretty much open-air arenas of whatever
you want. However, almost every place I’ve ever worked has a “no porn” policy.
I couldn’t even hang a SI swimsuit calendar in one of the offices I had due to
the policy at that university regarding revealing images. (Never mind that the
younger women who came to work often wore less than what the people on the
calendar wore, but that’s another conversation for another time.) It’s pretty
clear that these folks should have had an inkling that this wasn’t a good idea
and did it anyway.
And, finally, I don’t care that they were viewing porn.
There.
I said it.
Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking member of the House oversight
committee, was railing about how horrible it is that these folks were watching
porn while the economy went down the crapper. My question to people like Issa
is why does it matter what they were watching? Had they all been watchingMarch
Madness or videos ofa dog skateboarding, would that have been OK? Sure, the
economy is still fucked, but at least you weren’t jerking off in the office.
Our national and religious obsession with what people do or
don’t do or should or shouldn’t do with their genitalia is ridiculous. We don’t
want gay people getting married because we don’t want to think about what
they’re doing in the deep dark night with their peckers and bums. (However, if
it’s two smoking hot lesbians who are doing it on film to arouse a man… Well…
Awesome…) The Catholic church doesn’t want priests getting married because if
they’re banging some chick, they won’t have time to pray and ogle the altar
boys.The list can go on and on…
No, I don’t endorse a “let’s watch porn at work” policy. I
can’t imagine viewing porn on my work computer or viewing porn of any kind at work at all for that
matter. There are days I’m so self-conscious, I can’t take a dump at work. There
is NO WAY I could sit in the office and paddle the Gherkin to “Gentlemen prefer
Bethany.”
So, as we’re reforming our economy from the shitbox it is to something that doesn’t make Russia look well managed,
please encourage your elected officials to care less about what these idiots
were doing and focus more on what they weren’t doing.
Their jobs.