working the 9 to 5

I miscalculated when I thought I would have a few weeks off in between classes. My father gave his secretary vacation this week because he knew I'd be able to fill in. I didn't know about this, of course, until the other day. Ah the joys of family. And free labor.

It's not too bad; I should probably take this more seriously now that I really do want to be a doctor (as opposed to playing one on TV). Not that I'm sticking patients with needles or yelling things like STAT! CODE BLUE! MARCO! ....... POLO!

I'm answering phones and the like. Now, in order to continue with my diatribe, I need to give you a little bit of background. The normal secretary? V. nice, but missing a few tools in the toolbox. She had never used the internet until my father had it installed in the office about a year ago. She didn't leave any of the necessary papers or even the appointment book so that I could pick up where she left off. Needless to say, we were all a bit aggravated.

So the first thing I noticed when I got here was that the fonts on the computer were all sorts of screwed up. Huge fonts. Black background, white text for everything. I tried to fix it, but everytime we restarted the computer it reverted to the old style. And some webpages would look normal, while others were really messed up.

I am certainly no computer geek, but I did have the sense to think "I bet this computer has lots of viruses on it." So I started to hunt around and perform some of the standard cleanup techniques: clear internet files, cookies, etc. There were 10,000 temporary internet files. That's a lot. The computer crashed a few times while I was trying to delete them. And then I ran a program to delete the spyware. Whoa! This computer was a haven for lots of programs. What kind of stuff was being downloaded?

As the de-bugging software was running, some of the files I saw flash on the screen included "TeenSexXXX" and "SexXXSex." Hmm. Interesting. The plot thickens. Encylopedia Brown to the case! (because I'm brown ... get it ... insert collective groan here.) I opened up the web browser. The "favorite" websites were all displayed in a column. The second folder said "ErotikAB." It almost looks technical enough to bypass without realizing what it really says. Upon expansion, I discovered links to: Teen Sex XXX, Gay Porn Chat, CollegeGrls, etc. Whoa! What was this old secretary doing? I deleted all these things as well as whatever the debugger removed.

Now, I wondered whether to tell my Dad that his secretary is a perv. But then I noticed some of the previous websites visited. "Olsen Twins." "Christina Aguilera" etc. And I thought ... oh ... OK. The secretary has a young daughter. They don't have internet at home. And she's not that well versed in internet seediness. I realized she had probably gone to these sites and all the extra dirty stuff probably got put on inadvertently. Because seriously, you gotta be pretty oblivious to leave ErotikAB as one of the first links you can click on when you open up the Internet Browser.

So yes, mystery solved. No sneaky porn in the doctor's office, just really careless use of the computer.

And then today I spilled coffee all over the desk. Patient charts, the TV remote, the phone ... everything got soaked. Oops. Let me at them needles!