Games in the Workplace?

Anonymous Coward asks: "Back in the day it was not uncommon for games to contain 'Escape Buttons' and other commands to quickly exit a game. These games appealed to the Geek at Work as he could fill in his Friday afternoon and as soon as he heard his boss' shoes approaching, he could escape from the third dungeon and return to his spreadsheet. Yet games today are not allowing such activities to occur. Most games are requiring so much dedicated action that it is impossible to play a game and still switch back and forth without long delays. Where are the games for the worker?"

Comments

More like: Where's the Work?

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I like playing games at work when there is nothing to do, I would be just happy having a job at this point. 4 months of unemployment are enough for me!

Why was it I went to college again?

As a network administrator...

[DocSnyder]

...I don't see games improving security and stability on user workstations, especially on w1nd0z3 boxes. The worst things are multiplayer games which demand quite some bandwidth or even require alterations on the network infrastructure - yes, some people are smart enough... So if possible, please stay with rather non-intrusive games like Freecell or Pinball.

For *n?x people, text mode MUDs are great games to play. They don't affect any security issues (they run on an external host), and if you really hear your boss coming in too late, it's just one out of a dozen xterms on your desktop, so switching to a different one won't be suspicious at all. ;-)

this is why the economy is so bad now

[alphasmurf]

I fully understand overstaffing call centers, so that peak time is handled well. This is good customer service, and on the surface it's not a bad idea, especially when the customer is paying for it anyway.

Letting your staff waste their free time 7 hours (or whatever) a night of vid game playing is a corporate strategy that will eventually land your company out of business, and all of your happy nightshift guys out of jobs.

One of four things will happen to you.
1) your client will tighten their belt, and go with a strategy that only has the 3 people working, and deal with the reduced customer service level.
2) your client will hire a smaller group of people to handle the business themselves, and bring it inhouse
3) another company who staffs 15 people will make a bid to only charge your customer for 4 or 5 people, and your customer will leave.
4) your customer that is stupid enough to pay you for bloat staff will go out of business

How does #3 work ? By making your call center staff DO SOME WORK while not taking calls. If there literally isn't anything for them to do but sit around and wait, then you have bloat in other areas.

Who is your customer ? The firm I work for is large and has our fingers into all sorts of stuff, I am sure we could service them better than you are ...

`let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the smurf`

Re:this is why the economy is so bad now

[cxgd]

If you want a good response time, then you have to have people sitting around ready to take calls. How many times have you been on the end of the phone for 90 minutes listening to 'we value your call' crap.

Re:this is why the economy is so bad now

[gad_zuki!]

4) your customer that is stupid enough to pay you for bloat staff will go out of business

I know of one Chicago ISP that markets itself as being high-end. Not in a geek way, but in a customer service way. They're a little pricier, actually last I checked they were MSN/AOL priced for dial-ups and they have a call center just like the one described. Who would you rather give you 20 dollars a month to? 90-minute wait times to a stressed call center or to a place that gives its workers some leeway.

Lastly, how much do you think night-time tech support workers make? Trust me, it ain't enough to bankrupt any company and your customers will be thankful they can get a human voice on the phone who knows more than what the "troubleshooter script" says at 4:30am.

Re:this is why the economy is so bad now

[Sycraft-fu]

Ummmm, saying that the call centre staff should be doing something else while not taking calls is a silly idea. What are they supposed to do? It's not like employees are magical robots that can do any task you tell them, they are trained to do something, that's what they know what to do. You can't tell a call centre tech to go do something like a router upgrade, they don't know how. When dealing with things like customer service you just have to accept that you need to have people that, at times, will sit around and do nothing. That's just part of the job. I'm sure 3am techs don't get much work in general but know what? I've called in at 3am when my net connection went down, and I expected (being that it's a bussiness line) that someone would be there to take that call and to resolve the issue.

If you think cutting back on customer service is a good way to save money, think again. It's one of the reasons Qwest is going down in flames.

Re:Ah - the secret is to..

[freeweed]

Been there from Win95. It's how I managed to IRC all day at my former work :)

Basically, you can have mIRC minimize to the system tray. AND you can change the icon it minimizes to. I just made up a blank grey square. Boss walks in, alt-space-m makes mIRC disappear - it's amazing how adept one gets at this :)

Considering how full of crap the average system tray is, a bit of blank space in it never aroused suspicions :)

MUD

[Kidbro]

'nuff said.