I did a lot of things wrong as a freshman in college. I drank too much at parties and ended up crying and asking everyone where my mom was. I ate the chicken dish in the dining commons that everyone said you shouldn’t eat and got the stomach flu for three days. I lied to Standards about having family members die to get out of mandatory events so many times that I started to lose track of which family members were alive and which ones weren’t. Hey, I’m not perfect, okay?
Anyway, those things all paled in comparison to the time that the good ol’ university suspended all Internet privileges in my dorm room because I was watching porn.
I’m not a porn addict or anything, but I like to watch the occasional hot babysitter video as much as the next person. And this was my freshman year of college. I was spending a significant amount of time learning about life and the way the real world worked (read: I was masturbating a lot). Not as much as a teenage boy or anything, don’t get gross, but I was definitely enjoying exploring my inner woman. And my inner woman liked porn.
Now, I’m sure you all recall that there are rules on what you access while on the university network. I’m pretty sure they give you a packet on it at orientation that everyone immediately throws away. Illegal music downloading, inappropriate websites, all that good shit, is prohibited from being accessed while on that network. I have no clue what the stats are on how many freshmen actually follow those rules, but I did not. That worked out fine for me, until I got an email from the student judicial services committee that said they’d received a notification that my computer had been identified accessing prohibited material. I ignored the email, assuming it was just warning spam from the school, and then a bona fide student judicial affairs representative showed up at my door and told me I had to go to a judiciary hearing. I know, what the fuck, right? A girl tries to watch a little casual porn, accidentally gets spammed with some virus, and the university shits a brick. I’d like to see some outrage over that.
So at this point, I figure I have to go to the hearing. They’ll yell at me for the porn, and then most likely they’ll send me back to the dorm with a slap on the wrist, maximum.
Instead, what happened was that they told me they were shutting down all Internet access in my dorm room. No Ethernet portal, nothing. For how long, you may ask? Three entire weeks. I had to go back to my roommates and answer their questions about why our room would have no Internet for three weeks. None of us were in that room except to sleep for that time period, because this was before smartphones. Laptops were all we had and they had to be connected to WiFi, which we didn’t have. I was not the most popular person in the dorms for awhile. The university does not fuck around with porn. I should’ve kept that packet from orientation.
After three weeks, though, our Internet was turned back on. No harm, no foul right? I might have gotten a few death threats during that time, but I survived. Some people were dumb enough to get theirs shut off from illegal music downloading. At least my Internet got shut down because of something awesome: some downhome, all-American hardcore porn. Isn’t that, like, the definition of the American dream?.
Nice Move188
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Shannon Layne
My favorite things are tiaras, compliments, and free drinks, which are becoming harder to come by the more I tend to show up at the bar in sweat pants. The proudest moment of my life so far has been landing an actual, paying job that allows me to Facebook stalk people for a living. I tweet about my mom way too often, who is constantly trying to remind me that I'm not nearly as cool as I think I am. Please send me funny stories to read at work here: shannon.laynee@yahoo.com
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