Boobs at Work

Boobs at Work: Surfing Porn on the Public's Time

A humorous review of unacceptable ways to waste time on the job

By Steve Mirsky

The Internet is indeed a wonder of our age. Why, just last night, while watching the DVD of Inherit the Wind (it's Darwin's bicentennial birthday week as I write), I was able to simultaskically discover that Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, who play Matthew and Sarah Brady, were married in real life and often performed together in movies and on stage. (Inherit the Wind, by the way, is actually a bombastically bad movie. But it's fun.) My research was over before Matthew, a character based on William Jennings Bryan, could finish one of his long-winded speeches.

Of course, easy access to such tantalizing data has the potential for misuse. Which clearly was the case at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where an employee spent a significant amount of time at work perusing pornography. At least that's the official report if he claimed he was investigating grant applications from researchers investigating human reproduction, well, it didn't fly.

The incident, and some other porn-related surfing by a handful of other NSF employees, was revealed in the foundation's semiannual report issued by its inspector general. The primary porn culprit lost his job based on the misuse of time and resources that was estimated to have wasted some $58,000. And the foundation installed filters, just as countless other employers in the U.S. have done when faced with exactly this same kind of abuse of company resources. NSF employees looking for dirty pictures will henceforth have to be content with medical journals.

-cont. @ Scientific American