Surprise!

So today I taught a computer class on word processing to a group of five. It's a class that involves the "fun" stuff, like pretty borders and columns and clip art. We were doing an exercise to practice inserting a saved picture into a document, which was going just fine until the computers displayed the contents of the My Pictures folder, which is set to show thumbnails.

"There are some explicit photos here," said one of the five, a very sweet older lady and big supporter of the library. Well, crap. Sure enough, all but one of my students' computers were loaded with porn. Joy. The nice Russian man remarked on how it was good that we were all adults. Indeed. The crazy lady in the corner complained that all she had on her computer was pictures of sunsets. Crap.

I've seen patrons in tears because they found porn on the computer they were using and it was so traumatic for them. I apologized to my class, profusely, and everyone was able to laugh about it, but...oh dear Dewey...

What is perhaps even more surprising is that this is the first time it's happened, and I've been teaching the class for a couple years now.