Sunday morning and my wife Angela and I had driven over to her parents' house; they didn't live far away and we often visited for lunch. Besides Angela's parents -- Martin and Heather -- we were usually joined by Angela's two younger sisters; the twins, only fifteen, but could pass for twenty-one... Jail-bait in the first degree.
Angela has an older bother too, but beyond Christmas or perhaps on his mother's birthday he was rarely in attendance. He too lived only a few miles away, but his parents, most especially Martin, didn't approve of his lifestyle choices, so their relationship was strained; I already knew that he wasn't going to be there today.
The usual format was for Martin and I to walk down to his local pub for a couple of beers while Heather and the three girls finished preparing lunch; but not today it seemed. We arrived to discover that the twins wouldn't be joining us at all, as they'd gone off to play an away match with the tennis club and that Martin was currently down at his golf club and would be late.
Yesterday had apparently been the Golf Club's monthly-medal competition (whatever one of those is) but the competition had been abandoned due to thunder storms in the late afternoon; we'd had those at our place too, they'd been pretty lively. So Martin, along with a dozen or so other members, had needed to return to the club this morning to complete their rounds.
Martin had apparently phoned Heather before we arrived, to get lunch deferred until one-thirty and tender his apologies to me, for not being able to join me in the pub beforehand. Not going to the pub would be no hardship; I'd always thought the regular customers there were a bunch of unapologetic 'Little-Englanders'... Much like Martin himself really.
I declined Heather's suggestion that I go down there alone and instead offered to help with making lunch. That proposal was firmly rejected by my Mother in Law... Men don't cook, or indeed do anything around the house, such things are woman's work. I could see Angela standing behind her mother, struggling to stifle her laughter as Heather explained the way the world - or her version of it at least -- worked.
I'd long known that this was how Martin saw the world, but hadn't until then realised that Heather was equally... onboard with his thoughts; I'd always assumed that Heather just went along with him for a quiet life. With that explained to me, I proposed that I would instead get my laptop out of the car and check a few emails while I waited for lunch.
"Oh, that reminds me... there is a job you could do for me Steve."
"What, do you want something checking out online Heather?"
"No, nothing like that, but you could perhaps fix our big computer; it stopped working on Thursday and nobody in this house has the first idea of how to fix it. I was going to call the computer-man tomorrow, but as you're here and you know all about computers... I'll bet you could sort it out in a jiffy."
Angela was once again fighting to quell laughter behind her mother's back, this time at the suggestion that I was any sort of expert, at fixing computers. But I'd got nothing better to do and what's that old adage: 'In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king'. I headed for the staircase, tossing a wink to Angela as I went.
The 'big computer' lives on the dressing table in the guest bedroom and to be honest I hadn't realised anyone ever used it; it was always sat with a cover over the keyboard on the odd occasions we stayed over. Heather used an iPad, and while the twins had those too, they seemed welded to their phones; Martin of course claimed to have no interest in such modern fripperies and 'never looked at the damned internet'.
I sat down and turned on the power; it seemed to take forever to warm up, was it steam driven? When it eventually came into life, I saw the problem immediately; or one of them at least: Everything was frozen and a banner across half of the home-screen advised of some hard-drive threatening fault, which could only be rectified by sending $250 via Western Union.
Yeah, right, sure it will; this problem was perhaps within my limited abilities. I restarted the computer in safe-mode, searched for the most up-to-date restore point prior to the previous Thursday and let it whir. Five minutes later and we were up and running, albeit at a somewhat pedestrian pace; the computer was far from new, but it shouldn't have been this slow.
How much crap was on this computer? I downloaded -- eventually -- the free version of the Avast virus-scanner programme and let that run through the system. That took ages too, though to be fair, that was less surprising given the ever growing list of Trojans, Viruses and Malware it identified; once it'd finished I quarantined and then deleted the lot of them.
The computer felt much refreshed, but how had they all got there? Whereabouts on the internet had the family been going? Based on personal experience I had a fairly good idea and headed straight for the search-history to confirm my suspicions. Yep, and they hadn't even had the sense to use the Windows 'incognito' setting.
From the titles alone it was clear that the History list was wall to wall porn sites; mainly videos by the look of things, but Literotica and some other story sites had got their fair share of visits too. I opened a few stories at random and they were almost all reluctance/non-consent or BDSM, even those few that weren't tended toward the rough/male-dominant end of the spectrum.
The videos that I checked out too were all predominantly Male-Dom, some including bondage with a few showing threesomes and gang-bangs. It seemed that Martin perhaps wasn't quite so unfamiliar with the internet as he'd claimed? I also noted that few of the women in those videos were young; was that perhaps a little too close to home when you'd two teenaged daughters?
Martin wasn't just a casual porn-surfer either; I found two regularly visited sites that he was paying subscription fees for and it was that discovery which made me pause. I went back to the Desktop screen and confirmed what I thought I'd seen earlier: I knew that Heather took care of the household accounts and it was this machine that she'd recorded them on.
How had Heather not spotted any of those internet searches when she was using the computer? Similarly, if Heather were the one who checked the bank accounts and paid credit card bills, why hadn't she noticed and queried those subscription fees; what electronic equivalent of a 'plain brown wrapper' were they being charged as?
