A proper outage
Going back over a decade, a friend of mine had run out of space on his PC. Not a problem, I had a spare hard drive kicking around the office, so I offered to lend it to him until he could afford a bigger one.

A few months later, he gave it back to me as he'd upgraded and the drive was no longer required. I didn't really need it either, so it just sat in a desk drawer for a while.

Then came the question: "You did format that drive before you re-used it, didn't you?" The answer out of my mouth was "Yes, I'm pretty sure I did." The answer going on in my head was "I haven't, and I wonder why I should have done."

So it was now dilemma time. Conscience versus curiosity, and no prizes for guessing which won. The drive was loaded to the hilt with gay porn, both pictures and stories.

I pondered on it for a while and eventually made up some bullshit story about finding the drive months later, wondering what it was and so having a look and finding all of this stuff. The result? He rather dramatically came out of the closet. To me, to his family, to anyone who was prepared to listen.

But my role didn't end there. He needed a lot of hand-holding, and as a result, him, me and a gay friend of mine ended up touring the seedier gay bars of Liverpool. I didn't have a problem with that (worst case scenario is I'd have to say "sorry mate, I'm not interested") but to make matters more interesting, I'd developed a severe bladder infection and on one night kept meeting the same blokes in the toilet who no doubt thought I was there for the same reasons that they were.

But 'mind opening' experiences aside, he's now happily paired off (well as happy as you can be in a long-term monogamous relationship) and at least nobody's wondering why he can't find a girlfriend anymore. I often wonder how much longer he'd have carried on living the lie if I hadn't mentioned what I'd found on that hard drive.
( Horatio P Lemming, Mon 13 Feb 2006, 22:37, Reply)