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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
TL;DR: NAMBLA, it sucked.
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.