this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Back during the late 90s era of internet, I got into a MASSIVE amount of troyble over a finger slip in a high school computer lab.
We were all assigned an African country to write an essay about. We had to only use internet cited sources.
I was assigned a country with the Namba people. Somehow I fat-fingered an "L" in there in the worst places. (Between the 'b' and the 'a' - don't google it)
It triggered my school's search filter. Altavista got involved. It was a nightmare.
The police got in contact with my parents, thinking I was being groomed and in danger of kidnapping.
It sucked.
For those that want to know what it is, but dont want to risk searching:
____
North American Man/Boy Love Association
Fucked up organization, but not really all that scary to search
Wasn't there a south park episode about them?
Yep.
My parents ran a business named my last name and owned the respective reyalilastname.com domain. In the late 90s, my dad had a page on his site with widgets of the top 6 or so search engines. It was a great place to easily jump between Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, etc.
I was in the computer lab with my 6th-grade class kicking off some research project and recommended this page to my teacher who suggested it to all the students. That’s when I learned some classmates didn’t know how to spell my last name, and that removing 1 letter from my last name went to a porn site.
My name is nowhere near anything profane. It would be like McKenzie > McKenie or Saunders > Sanders. Literally nothing that would make you think ‘porn.’
The teachers didn’t notice, but several classmates asked me wtf my parents did. I was an awkward, nerdy kid who hadn’t accepted yet that I would never be popular and I believed providing a really good tool like that would help me achieve the popularity I craved (yeah, helping people do better on their class assignments was what I thought would make me cool—no wonder I wasn’t popular!). I remember feeling that hope just draining from my body as the misspelled page started popping up all over the computer lab.
I thought I knew where this was going when you said "African country" and "finger slip".
I'm too scared now to ask AI how many g's there are in Niger?
TL;DR: NAMBLA, it sucked.