Most of you know I build, fix and install computers for a living (we'll call it a 'living', despite my bank accounts opinion to the contrary).

So over the last 30 years I've worked in thousands of people's homes and seen a lot of stuff I wish I could forget.

Now one of the things I feel it's my responsibility to do is to check any computer I work on for the signs of paedophilia. If I don't - who can ?

Fortunately I have only ever found one and that actually had nothing to do with the owner. A virus was using a hidden area of the harddrive for storing web accessible files.
That was an interesting conversation. But not the subject of this tale

So it is my habit to look through any files or folders on a machine, particularly those that appear to have been 'hidden'.
You can't hide them from me

And over the years one of the things I have learnt is that I live in an area where there are a lot of 'swingers'.

Now lets be clear on this - 'swingers' are NEVER young or particularly attractive specimens of humanity.
NEVER.

One particularly memorable virus clean involved my looking at pictures of a middle aged couple engaged in vigorous sexual activities with a variety of different people, while simultaneously holding a conversation with the same couple who were sat on their sofa with a tv soap playing on the telly in the background.

It's also a job that tests your professional integrity.

A mate of mine has a sister.
I happen to know that she likes to engage in activities with one or more males while her husband takes photos of such activities. And yes Fire fighters really DO feature quite highly in this type of thing.

In that case I had to point out to the husband that his kids were getting to the age where they would be poking around on the computer and he really ought to offload his 'personal' pictures to a memory stick so the kids didn't find them.

They weren't really hidden.

Porn features a lot in my work.
There's the case where a couple had a computer absolutely riddled with viruses they'd picked up from porn sites.
And despite my beign able to pin down the exact date and time the sites had been visisted - both of them swore blind neither of them had done it.
In those situations you are left with having to say: 'well, whatever you did not do - don't do it again.'

Now I'm a mature adult and I really do not care what two - or more - consenting adults do together.
But you'd be surprised how many insist on lying to me - despite the fact that I can pinpoint exactly when they looked and at what they were looking.

On another occasion A friend of mine believed his son had been using the computer to look at porn.
By process of elimination and timing we actualy concluded that it had been his daughter NOT his son

Often it falls to me to point out the safest sites to look at pron to avoid picking up viruses.
I'm straight - but I've advised more than one person of the safest places to find gay porn.

And sometimes nobody uses the computer for looking at porn - but you don't remember those jobs so much.

^^   ewww

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Is amazing sometimes how long you can be talking to someone before realising they have super bad dementia. It's easier for me to notice because I'm in a closed ward so when someone comes up and asks if I can phone their daughter to come and pick them up because they need to go into the centre and catch a train to visit their mother, I already know there's something not quite right before they mention their long dead mother.

I once had one woman, who was also blind, get very angry at me because I wouldn't tell her where her purse was.  She needed it because she was going to the bank to get a loan to buy a summer cottage. The human mind is an amazing thing even when it goes wrong.

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Hey I can add to the work moments I won't forget and add to this conversation! I was on placement during my studies on a surgical ward and we had a patient that had been attacked by 3 or 4 people. He had been stabbed numerous times and (I still can't believe this happened to this poor guy) he got hit in the knee with an axe. An axe! In Helsinki! Right in the centre! Why was anyone carrying an axe around? Was this a planned attack? An attempted hit? Well...

The patient was walking through a park right in the centre of Helsinki and a guy asked him for a cigarette. He didn't have any so kept walking. The guy that asked came back with some friends... and an axe. Messed up. Seriously messed up. Apparently there was also a racial aspect to the attack just to really endear you that bit more to the attackers...

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