Before reading further, please be mindful that this is likely not safe for work, and probably not safe for sanity. If you're under 18, stop reading. Mom, close the damned internet tab, I can promise you that you don't want to read this. If you're not familiar with IT; ignore the big IT words, you'll still understand.
While working for a large, nationwide end-user tech agency, I ended up doing a diagnostic on a PC that was obviously suffering from a bad hard drive. The elderly woman who checked it in complained that it was making a clicking noise, and at the counter we were unable to get it to boot into Windows. The PC had two drives, a CD-RW drive, and a DVD-ROM drive. I was reasonably certain what the diagnostic was going to tell me, so I pop the diagnostic disk into the CD-RW drive, and surely enough, hard drive is toast. Sector repair fails, so the next logical option is replacement. I check the warranty information and find that the machine is under warranty, and the user brought in the System Disks as well. Now all that I need to do is find out whether she wants me to try and recover the data from the PC. So I call and leave her a voicemail message telling her what I've found, and advising her that I would start repairs as soon as I heard from her.
Now at the time, we had a tiered pricing setup for data retrieval. If the machine was functional and it was just a matter of copying the files to a disk, it was one price. However, if advanced recover (disk is completely hosed, data needs to be repaired) was required it was another price. Knowing that the woman would likely want a more exact quote, I turn on the PC to see if the previously attempted sector repair has made the system bootable.
Let me take this time to give the following warnings. First, never let Windows Autorun anything. Period. Second, don't assume that technicians are out to snoop for interesting things in your data, because 99% of the time, it literally pops out at us, and we're powerless to ignore it.
What happened next was basically the worst-possible-scenario of occurrences. As the machine successfully boots into Windows, Autorun takes action on the DVD disk, and it starts playing where it left off: Smack dab in the middle of Anal Fisting #5 (Best Movie Ever Edition)*. My coworkers and I watch in horror as this chick onscreen takes it up the butt, and then the phone rings. Of course, the person calling me is the woman who owns the PC!
Once my peers ascertain this, they are laughing to hard to do anything to stop the movie, and I've ran into the corner of our department to try and avoid the sound. I then proceed to explain what is wrong with the machine, what the costs for data recovery would be, etc. Just when I think I've managed to keep a straight face, the owner of the PC bursts into tears. She manages to choke out that the PC had belonged to her beloved son, who had passed away just a few weeks prior. And that she wanted the PC to work again so she could use it, but didn't need any of the data.
It then occurs to me that while I am on the phone with this grieving mother that her dead son's anal fisting porn is playing. That is when I completely lost it. Unable to handle the sheer bizarreness of the situation, I do what anyone else would do, I bust out laughing.
And that's why I laughed at the woman when she told me her son had died.
And that, friends, is why you don't die with anything incriminating on your computer.
*I don't remember if that was the precise title of the movie, but I know with 100% certainty it was labeled, "best movie ever"
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