Right out of college I had a job interview to be a web designer for a retailer. I was interviewing with the store owner and we were seated around the store owners computer in his office, looking at the company’s existing website.
At that time, everyone used Internet Explorer and the URL field had a drop down box that showed the most recent/most visited sites (I don’t know if it still has it, I haven’t used IE for years.).
We had looked at some competitor websites and he wanted to go back to a site we had looked at. He was looking over my shoulder as I hit the arrow which opened the drop down box of visited sites, and the list was FULL of p*rn sites. Just full of them! Down and down and down the list, with the craziest site names.
I sat there for a moment, looking for the site link we needed to visit, found it and clicked on it, and the page took forever to come up. The two of us sat there in silence, waiting.
He clears his throat a couple of times and finally says, “Uh, how did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Make that thing with all the sites pop up.”
“I just clicked on that arrow there and it shows you all the sites you’ve visited before.”
“That thing keeps track of everywhere you go on the Internet?”
“Yep.”
“Oh.”
The site then came up and we began talking about it. But I’m not sure either of us was fully “there”. We were both just sort of hurrying through the rest of the interview, wanting to get out from under the huge elephant sitting in that room.
The surprising thing to me? I got offered the job! (I didn’t take it).