Erector on the projector

December 19, 2005 9:39 AM

Has anyone heard any tales about someone doing a conference or seminar, setting up their laptop, and having porn or something similarly embarrassing accidentally come up on the big screen? It's gotta have happened. I've tried searching Usenet but it's a tough cookie to do keywords for.
posted by zek to Society & Culture (25 answers total)

At one of my previous jobs, we had an incident where our branch office VP went to corporate headquarters to give a presentation on why our office should not be closed. He was handed a laptop bag (by my boss, the IT Director) to transport his constantly-docked Vaio to the meeting. He never looked in the outer pocket of the bag and wound up having a well-used porno magazine fall out onto the conference room floor in front of all the corporate VPs. Needless to say, the prior user of the laptop bag (one of our salesmen) was savaged upon the VPs return to the office. The very same salesman also accidentally displayed his standard PC wallpaper on the projector, albeit a fairly tame Playboy spread (nothing hardcore, but definitely NSFW).
posted by daveleck at 10:16 AM on December 19, 2005

I was giving a presentation a year or so ago. I opened up FireFox, and the FoxyTunes extension happily showed that the last song I'd played was Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away". I don't know if anyone in the audience noticed, but my co-presenter did and that alone embarrassed me. Not quite full screen porn, though.
posted by ewagoner at 10:19 AM on December 19, 2005

I just checked Snopes, but didn't turn up anything. Come to think of it, wasn't this a fairly common trope in old Looney Tunes shorts? Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote or someone would be presenting a slideshow, only to be embarrassed when a slide appeared showing a bathing-beauty-type pinup?
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:26 AM on December 19, 2005

I read a story in the press about a year ago about someone making a business presentation, clicking on an icon on the desktop, and bringing up some kiddie porn. The person was fired and the issue was brought to the police. I don't have a link.

Separately, I was at a conference in the mid 1990's and someone from a company named Expertelligence was making a presentation to an audience of about 800 people. For some reason, he'd chosen to illustrate one of his slides with a topless woman. It was completely out of context, and someone called him out for it during the Q & A at the end of the talk. That was just bizarre, because it didn't appear to be a slip up on his part, but something he had done intentionally.
posted by alms at 10:32 AM on December 19, 2005

I read a story in the press about a year ago about someone making a business presentation, clicking on an icon on the desktop, and bringing up some kiddie porn. The person was fired and the issue was brought to the police. I don't have a link.

I've heard that story as well.
posted by delmoi at 10:34 AM on December 19, 2005

I wince at the memory still. 10 years ago I was using my laptop to do a presentation, then closed Powerpoint to launch a demo of the app. I was selling. I hovered just too long over the 'Recent Documents' entry on the Win. '95 Start menu as I was navigating to the program shortcut, revealing the names of the 'research' jpegs I'd saved the previous evening. I amused a few very senior Pirelli executives that day, I can tell you.
(Curse the Thinkpad Trackpoint, and bless TweakUI).
posted by punilux at 10:42 AM on December 19, 2005

Here's the story. (via)
posted by jjg at 10:51 AM on December 19, 2005

Wasn't there a police woman giving a presentation to school kids, surprised by a promotional screen saver from a show marketed for its lesbian content. I remember she was suspended but I don't have a reference. It caused a furore because the actual content was extremely mild, but lesbian in nature.
posted by godawful at 10:56 AM on December 19, 2005

I took a plant biology class in college during the early 90s which consisted primarily of slides displaying various leaf and root types, cut aways of the vasculature, etc. Dull stuff in a darkened, over-warm room. Several weeks into the class the professor hit on a slide of what at the time I guessed was his wife, standing naked in a field with her back turned to the camera. She was completely nude and fairly attractive. He flipped to the next slide quickly. Paused for about 10 seconds. Then flipped back to his naked wife, said "hmm, should take that one out" in a thick german accent and that was that.

Wherever you are Mrs. Ruddat, nice ass :)
posted by roue at 11:10 AM on December 19, 2005

Here's the lesbian screensaver story. (via)
posted by jjg at 11:19 AM on December 19, 2005

This happened to my friend's detested ex-coworker - presentation to clients/laptop/p0rn. He didn't seem to have suffered any ill consequence from that though.
posted by of strange foe at 11:20 AM on December 19, 2005

I work at a student-run newspaper, and one of my co-workers had a desktop that was hardcore gay hobbit pr0n. We're all college students, so a few people called her a freak because it was hobbits, but other than that everybody left her alone.

One day, the paper's advisor -- I think that's who he was; he was about seventy, with a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, and that whole professorial look -- dropped by the office.
posted by booksandlibretti at 12:01 PM on December 19, 2005

Speaking of biology people, I know a stunningly attractive girl who was dating an older biologist who used an expensive digital camera in his work, and for taking naked pictures of her. One day some lab techs got a special surprise :P
posted by delmoi at 12:04 PM on December 19, 2005

This ones TV presentation rather than computer presentation related. Years ago when I was at secondary school (high school) our French teacher was showing us a video of Les Quatre Cent Coups that he'd taped off the TV and about an hour into the recording it cut to a seriously raunchy (and loud) sex scene from some unidentified British film.

Needless to say, to a class of 30 bored 14 year olds whose parents never let them see anything like that this was hilarious. It took him ages to calm everyone down. We never saw the end of the French film either.
posted by jamesonandwater at 12:21 PM on December 19, 2005

I know I read a news story about a teacher surfing the web while proctoring a test, not realizing that the projector was on, displaying boobies. Middle school maybe?
posted by Aknaton at 12:50 PM on December 19, 2005

As a tech, once, I had a fired salesman bring his laptop to me before turning it in to his boss, because he wanted to delete all his "personal" files. He had been deleting them one by one for an hour already that morning. I showed him how to do a Select All, but instead of deleting, he hit enter ...

and they all began to open up on screen.

Fortunately, it was just the two of us, and his tastes were ... pedestrian.
posted by dhartung at 1:08 PM on December 19, 2005

Oh -- i hit the power button.
posted by dhartung at 1:12 PM on December 19, 2005

Do I have to look up everything for you guys? (via)
posted by jjg at 1:12 PM on December 19, 2005

19:00 hours, June 2, 2005. Novato, California. First meeting of an extension school class at Popup U. Professor X lowers lights, turns on projector, launches IE on his own laptop, and BANG! Hardcore Porn takes over the full screen and launches about a zillion more hardcore popunders.

Professor makes half-apology about his kid having used the laptop the night before. Somehow manages to kill all the IE windows. And then:

"Let's see if re-launching IE will fix it..."
posted by Triode at 1:57 PM on December 19, 2005

Yeah, here's a little tip for all the presenters out there.

1. Create a new user on your machine. Call it "presenter."

2. Only login as that user for presentations.
posted by bshort at 2:07 PM on December 19, 2005

Just finished watching Carol Reed's "The Third Man", and there's a scene in the movie which features a similar accident. The British investigator's assistant is instructed to fire up a slide projector to display evidence of the Orson Welles character's wrong-doings, but instead of photos of Harry Lime trading drugs in the Vienna sewers, Joseph Cotton is treated to an image of... a triceratops!

Okay, so it wasn't quite pornography, but I'm pretty sure the triceratops was naked. And the cop was a bit red-faced about the slip-up.
posted by soiled cowboy at 2:51 PM on December 19, 2005

Do I have to look up everything for you guys? (via)
Well done jjg!
posted by Aknaton at 3:14 PM on December 19, 2005

A good friend says a friend of his had an incident with his boss:

Boss: (gives employee her digital camera) I want you to take some pictures during this conference.

Employee: So how do you use this thing? (Starts fumbling with the camera. Up pops a picture of his boss in bondage gear. )

Boss: Ok, I'll take the pictures.
posted by hydrophonic at 4:41 PM on December 19, 2005

There's a scene in the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho, but he does it on purpose and its more pinup than porn.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:54 PM on December 19, 2005

jjg is clearly the go-to guy for embarassing porn presentation stories.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:02 PM on December 19, 2005