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State-Sponsored Solitaire?
jefu writes "According to this story the state of North Carolina may be considering banning solitaire on state owned machines. It seems that state workers are now perceived as having replaced leaning on brooms with playing solitaire or minesweeper. The story provides coverage of both sides of the issue, noting that playing solitaire (or other games) may provide workers with a way to burn off some stress, but that this kind of activity is likely to be perceived as time wasting. My favorite bit (especially as April 15th draws ever closer) is where the author notes that fifty percent of the time an IRS employee is on the computer they are playing games, shopping online or gambling."
As soon as I worked out the cheat that shows a colour changing pixel in the top corner of the screen I lost all interest in Minesweeper. Most my friends now believe I am psychic because I can 'sense' whether a square has a mine under it or not :)
http://www.sandstorming.com
fifty percent of the time an IRS employee is on the computer they are playing games, shopping online or gambling."
Are these IRS employees paying the full amount of the tax due on their gambling winnings? It is considered income, after all.
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More hours =? more productivity?
I know that it's bad to lose work time into games, but... really, what's worse? A worker who clears up his mind by playing sol 5 minutes, or a bored and tired worker who PRETENDS to be working but his productivity is actually half what it should be?
Bureaucracy...
Why play Minesweeper or Solitare when you can play a SpyHunter like game?
In Excel under file menu, do 'Save as Web Page'
Say 'Publish Sheet' and 'Add Interactivity'
Save to some htm page on your drive.
Load the htm page with IE. You should have Excel in the middle of the page.
Scroll to row 2000, column WC. Select row 2000, and tab so that WC is the active column.
Hold down Shift+Crtl+Alt nad click the Office logo in the upper-left.
Use the arrow keys to drive, space to fire, O to drop oil slicks, and when it gets dark, use H for your headlights.
Requires DirectX and Microsoft Office 2000 SP0.
If you update Office it will no longer work.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Ahh, memories...
1995, I was a contractor at an unnamed nuclear powerplant in Maryland. Windows 3.1 and all the BSD's we could stand. Solitaire was all the rage, and Management caught on.
One day the Solitaire shortcut doesn't work anymore, and a memo is circulated that "Game playing is bad...waste of resources...disciplinary action..." Stopepd us in our tracks? No (I mean, we are engineers for Chrissake)
Look for Sol.exe on machine...gone.
Search for "Solitaire" in shared drive...hmmm...that looks like some kind of script file in the root of the Network G: drive. Open it up - so it is: it checks user's machine at login and erases sol.exe. There is also a log in the directory: every instance of Solitaire being played on machines connected to that network for the last couple of months.
Solution to problem #1: reinstall Sol.exe, rename sol1.exe. No more logging.
Fun with the existing log:
"Hey Frank! (da boss)"
"What"
"You were playing Solitaire at exactly 1425 on March 3."
"Uh, how would you know that?"
"Big Brother is watching, Frank."
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
My girlfriend has just left a company which ran the same call center setup as you describe. The "Team leaders" have monitoring applications which show how many calls are in the queue, the longest call waiting, staff logged on etc. More importantly to them - who is logged off either because they are away from their desk, toilet break or aftercall time of 3 minutes to do administration and paperwork.
However, even this wasn't enough. They decided that people were taking too much time between calls and abusing the aftercall status. Management, who in turn monitor the teams efficiency through a desktop application, decided that aftercall would switch off after 3 minutes and a new call would be put through automatically. This put her and the other call center staff in even more stressful situation where they couldn't even have a minute to recover after a stressful, difficult or administratively complicated incoming call.
Their machines are also locked down to dedicated applications, there is also some hardcore email monitoring going on when they chat to their work friends, on or off a call. Playing games is completely out of the question to the ~250 or so employees. It surely cannot help performance when they cannot escape from their jobs even for a moment. They are forced to work 100% of the time, or receive a rollocking.
She is very happy she's had an opportunity to move on to somewhere else now, but from her stories after work it seems that management are forced to trust the accurate stats generated by technology and use it as a benchmark to increase productivity. Staff are leaving left, right and center.. yet they look at their historical performance stats and decide that they weren't worth keeping anyway. Crazy.