Slashdot Mirror
Fired for Solitare At Work
schlick writes "The Associated Press is carrying a story about a NYC employee fired after Mayor Michael Bloomberg noticed a game of solitare on the employee's desktop at work." From the article: "Greenwood, who earned $27,000 a year and had worked in the office for six years, said in a telephone interview that he limited his play time to his one-hour lunch or during quick breaks when he needed a moment of distraction. 'It wasn't like I spent hours and hours a day playing, because I had plenty to do,' Greenwood said. 'If I had been working at something exhaustively for two hours, I might get a cup of coffee and play for a minute but then go right back to my work.'"
The guy didn't work in New York, he worked at the Albany city legislative office. The median income for a male living in Albany is ~$31,000.
Breakfast served all day!
Now as a salaried employee, I constantly have slashdot, fark, etc open. On the other hand, I will read it, then do a bit of this, then read. In all honesty my productivity improves because to answer tough questions many times you have to distract yourself from them for a bit. (I am one of the most productive people in my group.) If the person wasn't playing solitare he'd be over in the other cube talking to a friend, getting some water, just roaming around, etc. That kind of thing has happened for AGES. To fire someone for playing a game for 5min is rediculious though it would be justifiable if the guy was always playing.
I do security
Original article also implies this guy had been reminded of the computer policies in 2004. Sounds like a repeat offender, and moreover he embarrassed the boss in front of company.
No, what it said was, "The mayor's office said its records show that in 2004 Greenwood reviewed the policy that prohibits "inappropriate" use of city computers." That means that they gave everyone a written copy of the AUP and had everyone sign something saying they received a copy of it and read it, something that practically everyone that works in an office of any size does in this day and age. It doesn't in any way imply that he'd broken the rules at any time.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
This reminds me of the old SUN3 workstations. There was almost no security. You could remotely log into another machine, do a "screendump" to an NFS shared partition, and then do a "screenload" on your local workstation to see what anyone was doing anywhere. We used it to look at the managment plan to outsource our entire division to another state and knew about the plan 2 weeks before it was announced.
Bloomberg build one of the largest privately held companies from the world from the ground up. His coworkers, some of whom I know, testify whenever possible as to the sweat and intensity he put into the business and how wonderful he was to work for. The benefits offered at his company are among the best in the industry. It's hard to accuse him of not understanding how work gets done or how to/not to treat employees in light of what he's accomplished in his life, in particular from a management perspective.
Also, if the employee were so indispensible, I assume his manager would have defended him and done whatever possible to give him another chance. Honestly, if the man got fired by a chance remark, even coming out of Bloomberg's mouth, he probably was on the line already for other reasons.