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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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On my first day at a new job in 1998, I watched a guy get escorted out of his office and the building carrying his stuff in a cardboard box. My use of the verb "escort" is ironic because it turned out that the guy had been running a prostitution ring. He'd gotten an 800 number that redirected to his office phone number, and he kept track of everything (names and phone numbers of his clients and girls and records of every arrangement) in a spreadsheet on his work computer. He only got busted because the company upgraded everybody's PC and had techs look through all the old PCs to make sure nothing important was going to get deleted; this dude had named his spreadsheet something like "call girls.xls" and had it on his Windows desktop.
This seemed amazing to me, but after working there a few months I realized how somebody could get that sloppy. IT Security at this place was fucking lax. None of us programmers had an identifiable boss or anything like clearly-defined responsibilities, or even rigid work hours. I remember one stretch for about a month where in a room with 50 people in it, all everybody did all day was call into the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? hotline and try to get onto the show.
Unrelated prostitution story:
So there was big prostitution scandal in my medium sized city once, and it hit all the papers. The rings that get all the press are the ones that are run by a MADAM. Pimp-run prostitution is boring. Put a woman in charge, and it makes headlines.
It was literally front page news, so I come into work, and ask my office mate about it, and he says "I used to work with a guy with same last name [which was unusual], I wonder..." and he calls him.
Was that guy pissed! As he said at the top of his lungs so even I could even hear it: "THAT'S MY EX-WIFE. THE FUCKING BITCH STARTED A PROSTITUTION RING USING MY FAMILY NAME!"