AutoComplete is Evil

Internet Explorer has a well-meaning feature called Auto-Complete that summons similar words and phrases you've recently typed, with the idea that it might save you a few seconds of time by letting you scroll down, hit return and get the entire phrase. However, it has the unintended consequence of immortalizing things you've typed that you'd rather not see again, and I'm not just talking about the time that I accidentally typed in an incorrect email address, which then became my "default" every time I typed in the first few letters of my login. I'm not even thinking of the time that I saw "Anna Nicole Smith naked" on my Uncle's laptop when I was visiting last year and Googling something starting with 'A.'

Today, as I was googling something starting with 's' on one of the communal grad student computers today, AutoCorrect brought up the usual suspects (and I'm paraphrasing here), and then something scandalous and/or disconcerting.

sociology survey research
sociology survey gender research
sociology survey campus attitudes
std test

After cringing and feeling a bit uncomfortable to have seen that, I couldn't resist speculating as to who would be googling 'std test' in my department. Based on the other terms on the AutoCorrect (which certainly could have been written by anyone, although I think the AutoCorrect on those computers gets cleared regularly), I'm pretty sure that it's one of the female "gender conformists" in my department (well, a specific one of them). I'm no expert when it comes to people, love or relationships, but I have a hunch that if you aren't responsible enough to do "better than frat boy" with casual intimate relationships (or at least invest a few bucks in some Trojans), you're also prone to be googling 'std test' on public computers. I hope it was an "innocuous googling", and I can't be totally sure the person I think queried it is who I think it is. Regardless, I didn't think graduate students were the type of people that have to learn with backwards induction based on experience with these types of things...