ANIMAL PORN I was working in the fundraising office of an animal charity.  It was situated in the east end of the city and, each morning, the bus ride took around 45 minutes.  I was almost always hungover and would sit on the top deck of the bus, clinging onto the seat in front of me, white as a sheet.  Sometimes other passengers would ask if I was alright. The office was above a veterinary centre so, upon reaching work, I would hear the howls of pain coming from the surgeries.  This didn’t do much to ease my hangovers. My boss, Lynn, was not much older than myself, but she looked and acted at least ten years older.  She was usually alright but could turn nasty at the drop of a hat.  This was actually worse than if she had been a full-time bitch, because you never knew where you stood with her.  She could be as nice as pie all day and then, suddenly, be a complete cow five minutes before you were due to leave and want you to stay on late.  She had obviously been on some ridiculous management course and thought she had to keep the workers in their place. My work-mates mostly annoyed the fuck out of me.  There was Ronnie, a five foot tall man in his 50s with an irritating Fife accent.  He was one of these two-faced people who would delight in slagging off the boss when talking to us, but would lick her arse when she was in the room.  Judy was a 50 something ex-school teacher with a limp.  She would occasionally talk to people as if they were children (probably a throw-back to her previous job).  Sandra was what people used to call a ‘spinster’, which would be an unkind description if it didn’t suit her so well.  In her 40s, perhaps, she wore the most old-fashioned school-marmish clothes you could imagine.  Hideous flowery dresses and ‘sensible’ shoes.  She left for another job a month or so after I started and I can’t say I was particularly sorry.  Lynn’s father, Tom, would usually be there too, helping out.  He was okay, although could sometimes be a bit pompous, which made me realise where his daughter got it from.  He was an ostensibly very butch guy but, dressed in cut-off denim jackets and sleeveless T-shirts and sporting a neatly trimmed moustache, wouldn’t have looked out of place in a gay night-club.  Lastly, there was John, who started after me and would only come in a couple of days a week.  He was a really nice guy.  Retired, he lived in a posh west end area with his wife and cats.  He would usually give me a lift home, as it was on his way.  He was diabetic and shocked me somewhat the first time he injected himself in the office. Everyone who worked there seemed to like animals a lot more than humans.  The boss and Ronnie, particularly, talked about their pets as if they were children.  In fact, Ronnie obviously preferred his cat to his own daughter, whom he had not spoken to in months.  Ironically, I was the only one there who was a vegetarian and didn’t have any pets.  I thought their so called love of animals was somewhat hypocritical. We had to arrange fund-raising events and collect money from supporter’s groups from all over the country.  Once, I set up a rocking chair marathon, where some poor idiot agreed to sit in a rocking chair, continually in movement, for 48 hours.  This was done in the swanky Hilton hotel (who provided the room free of charge – as a charity, we never paid for anything). He only lasted around 20 hours before collapsing in exhaustion.  The boss was pissed off he didn’t last the distance, even though we had got quite a lot of free publicity out of the event. Lynn used to travel up and down the country, visiting supporter’s groups and the head office.  On these occasions, I would use her office to do research for her on the internet.  One day I was particularly bored and pissed off with my co-workers.  I was also still slightly drunk from the night before.  So, instead of searching for the usual boring sites, I logged onto some hardcore pornography. It was the first time I’d ever seen internet porn and the ease with which I managed to access it amazed me.  I started to print off some pictures on the boss’s expensive colour printer. People were coming in and out of the office all the time, which only made the whole thing more exciting.  Once, I had to quickly turn the monitor off when Judy came in unexpectedly. This went on for several weeks, until I had a large collection of the stuff.  I’d even had to replace the colour ink cartridges in the printer a couple of times.  I’d be in the car with John after work with my brown A4 envelopes filled with porn.  The secrecy of the whole thing was the only exciting thing about working in that place. The internet was still very new to me and, somewhere, I heard about these things called cookies which stored all of the sites you had visited.  I began to panic and would ask anyone I came into contact with on a social level how you went about deleting them.  Eventually, someone told me and I managed to delete all of the history, cookies and temporary internet files on the boss’s PC.  I felt a great sense of relief, but this did not stop my downloading of porn.  I would still do it, then eliminate all of the evidence straight afterwards. Then, one day, Lynn called me into her office.  She had a stern look on her face, which wasn’t all that unusual, so I wasn’t terribly worried. “Mark, how come all of the history’s been deleted on my PC?” Shit. “History?  What’s that?” Feign ignorance, I thought. “Oh, that’s what shows you all of the sites you visit on the internet.  It doesn’t matter.  Head office has a record of all that anyway.  All the computers are networked.” I don’t know if my face went bright red or if I just imagined it did, but I left her office and spent the rest of the day in a sort of daze. Each day when I went into work after that, I was expecting some sort of terrible scene, police being called (although, I must stress, all I downloaded were pictures of consenting adults), Lynn’s dad kicking the shit out of me, Judy wailing and screaming at the disgrace of it all.  It never happened. Lynn told me that the annual audit, which was due that month (December), would state exactly what sites were visited on her computer and I made a decision never to return to that office.  I took my Christmas holidays early and did nothing until February.  January was mainly spent worrying about what would be discovered at the office I had left behind. The strange thing is, I don’t think anything happened at all.  I have since met people from that office (Ronnie, John and a girl who worked there after me).  According to them, nothing but good things were said about me and Lynn thought it was a shame that I had left (I’d sent her a letter saying I was too ill to go back). In February, I started a new job working as a personal assistant to a woman who helped adults with literacy and numeracy problems and I met a couple of really nice people there who are drinking buddies to this day.  So, maybe it worked out okay after all.  But I still won’t ever look up porn at work ever again.  I have a computer at home now for that purpose!