Fixing the spam filter, followed by lunch

Sara spent a good chunk of the morning trying to figure out why her spam filter was letting these hardcore porn ads through. Eventually she discovered it was a combination of two things. The first was that somehow, the words 'cum', 'bukkake', 'jizz', and 'semen' had been removed from the company's spam keyword filter. That was odd enough, but the second was even stranger. Apparently her company email address had been signed up on several porn sites to receive notifications about new videos tagged with those keywords.

Sara couldn't help but roll her eyes at this. Clearly someone in the IT department was playing a lewd prank on her. She didn't exactly know what would motivate them to do such a thing, but clearly she'd have to come down on them hard for this. She re-added the keywords to the filter, did what she could to unsubscribe from the notifications (not easy when she didn't have the information for the accounts they were tied to, but far from impossible), then sent an email to Chuck, the head of her IT department.

Hey Chuck, would you have any idea who would try to fill my inbox with smut? I had to go in and undo the sabotaged filters myself. You should be on top of this. And how did my work email get signed up for a bunch of porn sites?

It wasn't long before she got a reply back. Not surprising, given that Chuck was almost always on his computer during work hours.

Sorry about that, Sara. A hacker got into the system last night and messed with a lot of our automated processes. They must have gotten a hold of your company email and signed you up for those porn sites as a joke. Don't worry, I'll handle it.

Sara smelled something fishy about the response. If there really was a hacker that got into her system, and Chuck knew about it, why was she only being told about this now? In fact, why did no one else in the company seem to have been targeted by this 'hacker'? And why would they use their access to company servers solely to pull some immature prank rather than do any kind of actual corporate espionage?

She wasn't buying it. She CC'ed her HR representative, then sent another response.

I already fixed it. Company policy is that you're supposed to report cyber-security breaches immediately, so why is this is the first I'm hearing about a 'hacker' getting into our system? From what I've seen, it looks more like the work of a stupid IT prank than an outsider to me. I'm sending this to Nicole for review. If you're lying to me Chuck, it's your ass on the line.

She sighed and downed the last of her odd-tasting coffee. Mondays...

Several floors down in the IT department, Chuck was hard at work playing Hearthstone when Nicole came barging into his work-space, red-faced with anger

"Chuck, what the hell were you thinking?" the curly-haired firebrand hissed, "Seriously, signing her up for porn sites? Are you fucking insane?"

"H-hey, don't put all the blame on me!" Chuck said, quickly hiding the game screen to focus on her, "Frank's the one who came up with the whole subliminal messaging idea."

"You call what you did subliminal messaging?" Nicole asked, "That was so unsubtle you might as well have just outright told her to drink a bucket of jizz! You could have ruined everything!"

"I'm sorry!" he said defensively, "This isn't exactly my forte. I figured that if she saw a bunch of spam highlighting cum play every time she opened her inbox, it'd make her curious, y'know?"

"Well unlike you Chuck, she's not an idiot!" Nicole shot back, then groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose, "Look, I covered for you this time and corroborated your bullshit hacker story, but pull a stunt like that again and I'm leaving you out to dry. Got it?"

"Yeah, yeah, I got it," Chuck said, waving the HR rep off, "Now get out of here, I'm about to run out the timer for my tu- er, deadline."

"Lunchtime!" Rachel said, popping into Sara's office with a take-out box and drink.

"Oh thank God, I'm starving," Sara said with a smile.

Rachel giggled a bit at this and set the box down on her desk, "You sure you want to eat in here today? You've been cooped up here all morning."

"Yes, well, the incident with my email means I'm behind on my work," Sara responded, "I going to need to push through lunch if I want to get caught up."

"Alright then," Rachel said with a disappointed frown, "Let me know if you need anything else, Ms. Reynolds."

"Will do," Sara said, waving her secretary off. Once the girl left, she popped open the box to reveal the chicken salad within.

"Ugh, I asked for dressing on the side," Sara grumbled upon seeing the pale white sauce coating her meal. Sighing at yet another annoyance cropping up today, Sara turned back to her computer and went to work, splitting her time between typing and eating. Taking the first bite of her food, she couldn't help but notice that the dressing had a very peculiar flavor and consistency. She could taste a hint of ranch, but there was also a much stronger taste that she was having trouble identifying...