An anonymous employee of the City of Baltimore was recently dismissed when he was caught downloading pornography onto his work computer. Lots of pornography. According to MSN, the employee “allegedly used a city computer to download more than 4,000 sexually explicit images in a span of one month.”
That’s… quite a bit of porn. Downloading 4,000 images in a month means that he couldn’t have been doing much more with his time than looking at jerk-off material at work. No wonder someone noticed his lack of productivity and registered a complaint! It’s good that, according to ABC news, “The employee admitted he knew accessing and downloading the photos was in violation of city policy, and that he downloaded them during work hours.” No point denying the very obvious, very large cache of smut on the hard drive.
But at YNOT, we’re a little confused on a few points.
First of all, why did this person even have the ability to access porn sites on his work computer? It’s odd that the government of the City of Baltimore—which must be a large institution, given that well over a half million people reside in the city—doesn’t have a firewall in place to prevent employees from accessing smut, much less downloading it to their hard drives.
Which brings up another point of befuddlement: This man was able to access hardcore porn from his computer…so he downloaded it. Does he not know about free streaming porn websites, which one can access without jamming one’s work computer with dirty pictures? Does he not understand how the internet works? Or, if downloading itself is his fetish, has he never heard of a flash drive?
This, in turn, brings up a further question: Did this upstanding citizen just not get computers? Is the City of Baltimore not providing its employees with computer training? We know that city budgets can be tight, but surely it’s more financially sound to train employees in the basics than it is to turn uneducated newbies loose on city computers. Destruction of city property seems inevitable if that’s the case.
In an employment situation with neither firewalls nor technical training in use, we find it hard to believe that the gentleman in question is the only one using work computers to violate city policy. And we doubt that explicit photos are the most dangerous of the uses to which Baltimore City’s computers are being put.
We’re not saying it’s okay to spend all your time at work downloading porn, of course. But we’re also give the City of Baltimore the side-eye and suggesting that perhaps they consider getting their house in order so they don’t end up having to replace more of their workforce… and more of their smut-, virus-, and malware-riddled computers.
