• popemichael@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Lux@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      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

    • Reyali@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • konalt@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I thought I knew where this was going when you said “African country” and “finger slip”.