Privacy Screens

If you work in certain professional fields in a job that requires you to carry a laptop and do your work in places like planes and trains and coffee shops, then there’s a tool that you really need to have: a privacy screen. It’s a screen you put over your laptop’s screen so that it can be seen [almost] normally when looking straight at it, but when you look at the screen at an angle you can’t see anything. More precisely, you can see your screen but someone sitting beside you can’t see it.

So if you’re a political strategist and you’re sitting in Starbucks while you write an email to your candidate to tell her that you just found a video of her on Smutty which, while hot, will be damaging to her credibility, you don’t have to worry about the person sitting beside you reading about all of this while they sip their latte.

My work requires me to deal with sensitive information, sometimes, or just plain private information, so I have a privacy screen for my laptop. The nice added bonus is that if I have a half hour of spare time at work I can start typing out, say, a blog post for this blog, and nobody around me will know what’s going on. They’ll just see me typing madly away and assume that I’m working on something important.

There is one drawback, though: I’m so used to having the privacy screen that it’s just a matter of course to know that it’s there and people beside me don’t know what I’m doing. But occasionally I do remove it so that I can show colleagues something on my screen, and I don’t always put it back on immediately. So if I were to go back to editing a post for this blog, or maybe pull up a chat window for some dirty talk with some hot young thing, I might have a very misplaced surety of my privacy.

Luckily I haven’t been caught so far. I would say “knock wood,” but on a blog like this, that phrase conjures up images of injured cocks.

Incidentally, “injured cocks”? Exactly the type of phrase one doesn’t want one’s colleagues to see at work.