Wednesday 18 March 2015

Three Judges Jigging

So while we await the serious business of the day ... those naughty judges and their 'judicial IT equipment', eh?   Stand-up comedians will devote whole five-minute riffs on those w*****s in wigs, no doubt.

Reminds me of a funny episode from the world of work.  I was once an exec at a firm with a software division, and one of our IT lads, an Asian chap as many of them are in that line, was bang to rights on some serious business misdemeanour, bad enough for summary dismissal.  We hauled him in, had his laptop impounded while he was having his fortune read for him, gave him the black bag and showed him the door.  

He pleaded with us to be allowed to download some personal stuff from the laptop.  We decided this was fair enough, since he had to travel a lot for the firm and we all understood you have to conduct a bit of personal admin when you are away from home for days at a time.  But the downloading had to be under close supervision, with a trusty on the keyboard.

We all looked at each other, and one of the board, a very straight-shooting Asian lady, said "leave this to me".  She had a fair idea what she was going to find, and it wasn't just his personal banking ...

Anyhow, she made him suffer exquisite agonies of embarrassment in our open-plan office.  It was bloody funny.

Your stories in the comments, please.  Delicate turns of phrase if you don't mind, this is a family blog.

ND

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope this was a long time ago Mr D, it would be against his Human Rights now.

JS said...

Feel a bit sorry for the judges - a lack of "judgement" indeed, but do we really want to throw away the 20+ years of training required to get that point, over something that internet stats would have us believe is pretty run of the mill ? I think a yellow card would have sufficed.

Umbongo said...

A generation ago this lot would not, I think, have been referred to as "judges": they would have been (and are) "stipendiary magistrates" or - as far as the immigration bloke is concerned - a "member of the immigration tribunal". In other words, these men are not "judges" in any meaningful sense or rather only "judges" in the sense that a "First" from the University of Chav is equivalent to a First from Oxford. Of course, the BBC in its mission to trash anything smacking of the traditionally high principles of the bench, announced this against a background photos of judges of the High Court in full wigs.

Budgie said...

Well, this is a minefield isn't it? Although it is tacitly acknowledged even by feminists, we are no longer permitted to say out loud that the sexes are different. But they are.

One of the many differences (tendencies; statistical distribution maybe normal) is perception of the other sex. Men tend to go for 'attractiveness' (fortunately perceived differently by different men), and women for provisioning ability. It is evolution's/design's way of achieving attractive, successful progeny. Of course both are nuanced by other factors, sometimes heavily.

Although you hear feminists advocating pornography to "empower women" (methodology unexplained), it appears to me that the majority of porn is consumed by men. It is a development of men's visual triggering. Consequently I find it difficult to condemn non-violent adult pornography.

Nevertheless the judges were fools to engage in such viewing at work. And since they did use porn at work it is an indication of an excessive compulsion that could have led to unfair judgements. I think some of their recent cases will need review.

dearieme said...

Does tha tSherry Blair still do a bit of the old judging? Or indeed the old fare-dodging?

Bill Quango MP said...

I can only remember one boss who interviewing a candidate was amazed she knew about business.

She knew number of outlets, turnovers, directors histories....she must be a spy?

I explained that there was this new tangled invention called " the Internet" .

Well, he said.. Anyone who knows how to use that...we don't want working here.

This was in about 2003.

BE said...

A former colleague once claimed to have popped into the office late one evening to pick something up on his way home, to be greeted by one of the big bosses sitting at his desk, trousers around his ankles, desparately minimising all his browser windows.

I am sceptical. However, I do know that there is a definite policy of no internet monitoring at work.

Anonymous said...

"have to conduct a bit of personal admin when you are away from home for days at a time"

Personal admin, nudge nudge wink wink.

CityUnslicker said...

Having worked at a few big firms, there is on slective monitoring - ie.e it gets flagged for repeated, er, abuse.

Most people I have seen get cuahfgt it is because the sleazy stuff comed withe pages that download virus' or attempt to and workplace firewalls pick that up.

On the whole I feel the attitude is usually gorwn up, but times are a-chanin' no doubt.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you should start paying cash from now on.

http://www.foiman.com/archives/1490

Suffragent said...

So what cases were they working on??? The people must know (takes off tinfoil hat)

Budgie, Hence the phrase “it’s of as much use as a man in a porn flick”.
Using work computers to surf such shameful stuff (when they could be reading this blog) is just plain stupid.
Not condoning but offering a different viewpoint from a less oppressive and more logical country. When I did my university placement at a company in Germany, they took a different approach. (it was a bums on seats office setup, paying students rent and survival wages, at the same time charging the customer 60 dollars an hour for our in-house Engineering services(so they weren’t that interested in work turnover. Practically shunned it). A workforce of 4000, 80% males, mainly in their early 20s living away from home for the first time (and no money to do anything in the evenings).
The following was announced at all group meetings, “Due to a severe shortage of disk space on our server and reaching our web limit, we have now installed a separate server for you to store “artistic” material. When downloading pictures and videos please do not change the file name and you can’t create individual folders. To help our broadband access, before surfing the net, please browse this folder (our IT experts believe this contains a large proportion of what you would find surfing. Using our old setup we found one file saved in over a hundred different locations).
The sheer volume of disk space used was incredible, not to mention the temporary internet files and cookies.
The same company bought a state of the art A0 photo quality printer and the 50m roll of paper that came with it was used in the first night (only the IT department knew we had it at this time)

E-K said...

Pre PC days (personal computer) I used to buy porn from the corner shop in hard copy version (Reader's Wives - Asian Babes et al) and walk them back to the section house in a brown paper bag.

(Section house - police lodgings)

I was stopped and searched by my own sergeant who was patrolling with a female sergeant, "What's in the bag, E-K ???"

Fucking embarassing, that.

(Real name not E-K)

Raedwald said...

Many years ago the only woman in a 6-strong Time & Motion (as it was then called) team caught a male colleague masturbating at his desk over a magazine.

She declined to take any official action, but let it be quietly known what she had seen whilst refusing to name the culprit. The truth of her tale was implicitly endorsed by the Personnel Manager.

For years after her five male colleagues were the subject of speculation and conjecture at all levels throughout the firm as to which of them it was; conjecture was generally divided into the Fred-ists and Peter-als as the two most likely, new starters to the firm were inducted to the story before being introduced to the T&M department. It provided tremendous fun and kept them in their place.

She retired without ever revealing which one it was.