“When I was in my gap year, I worked a part-time job as a fitness instructor at a leisure center. One of my coworkers, call him ‘Bill,’ was a nice guy and I would often sit and chat with him on my breaks.
As part of my job, I used to teach spinning classes on a fairly regular basis. I would normally leave my phone in the staff room while I was teaching, or behind the reception desk. Both these places were secure, and my phone had a passcode on it. I didn’t want it going off while I was teaching because when it received calls/texts, it interfered with the stereo in the spin studio. I didn’t have a locker or anything where I could store it.
Sometime in around January, I was at my university for an interview weekend. My girlfriend at the time had come to pick me up and while she was waiting in the car, she was scrolling through my messages on my iPad.
When I got in the car, she showed me one of my chats and said, ‘Why did you send this video to Bill?’
I had no recollection of sending any videos to Bill, since I did not speak to him outside of work beyond ‘I’m going to be late,’ or similar.
I thought it was a mistake but as I scrolled further back up I saw ‘I’ had sent this same video to Bill a couple of weeks prior. Feeling thoroughly perplexed, I clicked into the video and saw it was a video of my girlfriend and me on holiday in Thailand. We were just joking around, but we had just got out of the shower.
At this point, I was still thinking it’s some kind of big mistake as Bill is a nice guy with a baby at home. However, I look a little closer and realized the dates/times of when ‘I’ had sent these videos was at times I was teaching spin classes, and therefore had left my phone unattended.
Bill, being the sicko he was, had obviously seen me put my passcode into my phone during all the times we had been sat chatting on breaks, and had memorized it. He had then taken the opportunity to scroll through all my personal photos and videos when I had left my phone unattended to go and teach classes. I’m assuming he had deleted the video once, hence why he had sent it to himself again a couple of weeks later. He’d also deleted the chat history from my iPhone but hadn’t realized it synced to my iPad. I would only have been about 18/19 at the time when the videos were taken.
Obviously, I reported this to my manager and to HR, but it was a bit of a minefield for them to navigate. I don’t know what he told them but I imagine it was along the lines of saying I sent them to him of my own free will, how would he have known my password. It took a long while to get sorted but in the end, he did get sacked, thankfully. The police also paid him a visit so I’m sure he had some explaining to do to his SO.”
