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.'"
What was his computer policy at work? If I do it, I'm fired if they want to enforce it.
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
If he was playing on a break or on his lunch time, i dont see an issue. If his job wasnt getting done fire him..
That was a scumbag move of the mayor, firing him without even talking to him.
Of course. Their computers, their rules.
However, one could make the argument that, since the game was installed, it was 'approved' for use....
Nobody ever gets fired for playing tabletop role playing games at work. At least, nobody I ever heard of. Surely this is because computer games are so much more detrimental to productivity.
On a related note, back in Law School, most folks used laptops to take notes. The Dean used to walk through the back of class from time to time. If he was in a particularly bad mood, he'd signal the professor teaching to call on whoever was playing solitare. Getting "called on" in law school is often just as unpleasant in real life as it appears in movies like "Legally Blonde." More so when you're playing solitare and not paying attention. It was evil, really.
Nobody ever got kicked out of school for it though.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
We are all just people.
Most employers also try to fire someone because they aren't liked, or if they are perceved as a liability to the company. And let me explain what that means.
There is a person at a company I work for, that gets the mandatory levels of productivity needed to keep the job. They are also very outspoken about company issues, which disagree with the current practices (union and so on). So every time he gets audited (monthly process) they purposefully find his worst interactions in the hopes that he'll be below standard and they can fire him. Some people didn't believe this so he purposefully made a small mistake in one interaction and wrote down the ID of that interaction. The next month, that was the one audited. This has been shown more than once, and they're just waiting for an "approved" reason to terminate employment.
This kind of discrimination does exist, they just hide it behind protocol and procedure.
I don't get it.
Yep. It's like my parents and I when I was in high school:
Mom: "Okay, what car are you taking?"
Me: "My car."
Dad: *COUGHAHEM*
Me: "The car which I am permitted to use."
Dad: "Have fun!"
I see it all the time- employees get very posessive about their computers. The word "my" is thrown around very casually, they get attached to them, etc. Hell, I worked at places where people (almost exclusively sales staff) would take laptops with them when let go, and they'd act REALLY pissed when we called them and asked for them back. Some we had to literally harass the CRAP out of, to get machines returned- and when they were, they'd invariably be damaged, usually the keyboard and mouse/trackpad buttons; it was clear they whacked the shit out of it with a shoe or something just to piss us off.*
It's equipment. Capital. I don't see a machine shop operator getting pissed when he's fired and he can't take the mill home with him...
*I've also had to lock sales people out of databases WHILE they were getting "The Talk", because in the past, every single one of their predecessors had immediately logged in to the customer database from home and dumped it... un frigging believeable. Never had more trouble with terminated/let go employees than with sales dweebs/bimbos. ZERO morals, which I'd like to think was part of the reason they were fired.
Please help metamoderate.
Indeed. They installed the solitare software, then, didn't they? They provided the software, and the required rights to use it.
It's akin to giving a deck of cards to every employee as they are hired and then firing anybody who uses them at work.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
The bottom line is that if a company does not want an employee to use a resource, then they company should not supply the resource, or limit the use. For instance, reading ponography at work is probably also frowned upon, but would a company have a case if it provided that SWANK in the library, and then fired employees that chose to utilize it?
Now, one might say that employers provide the internet, and that can be used for ponography. The thing is the employer does not actually provide the ponography/ In fact, if the employer was smart, filters would in place to limit access to these sites, and employees who tried to circumvent the filters could then be fired.
In the end firing this guy is like firing a guy who picked up $10 from the ground. Sure one could say it was theft, but it might also be entrapment. Hiring and trainine employees cost a lot of money, and one does not fire them friviously. Unless, of course, one is borrow and spend republican.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"But Mr. Ford! You can't fire me!"
"Why the hell not?"
"I don't work for you! I work for the phone company!"
Realistically, roomates. Preferably several with compatable shift/sleep schedules.
Alternately, you'd be surprised what you can live on. Here in CT minimum wage is 7.55/hr. That works out to 15,704 dollars per year. Absolute crap money pretty much anywhere.
Rents can be found as low as 500/mo if you really look hard, realistically 600-700 is the lower range for a studio or smallish one bedroom(working on moving out ATM, so my info is fairly current for the New Haven area). Get fond of ramen and Goodwill stores, and you can survive on minimum wage. You will have a pretty shitty life, but you wont' be homeless, and you won't die of malnutrition(some malnutrition related illnesses are possible, but not likely to face a lethal problem in the short term).
Granted, NYC is a lot more expensive than the ghettos of CT that I'm referring to here, but 27k is also a lot more money than 15.7k. I'm sure most people can survive on that much in NYC if they are willing to be ruthlessly frugal. Not a life many would want, but it is possible.
This isn't even accounting for various welfare programs which can make living on shit wages much easier, such as Section 8 housing which fixes the max rent you will pay to 1/3rd of your income(run the numbers above, that minimum wage in CT scenario leads to well over half of your income going to housing).
When I did PC support, there was a new-hire secretary who had no Windows experience. (This was in the days of Win3.1). I showed her how to find the games, as these would help her to use the mouse. Without that, she'd no idea about what the mouse did, or what it was for.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
This might be an urban legend, but I always heard that MS included solitaire to teach people the funtamentals of 'double-click' and 'click-and-drag'. I also seem to remember Apple including a sort of adeventure game on the Apple II gs to teach users similar skills.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
When I worked at a gov. office, and every one of my co-workers took smoke breaks, I very insistently took reading breaks. Whenever a manager tried to call me on it, I asked why the smokers could wander off whenever they wanted to.
I do believe I had one boss try to claim that was different because "smoking is an addiction". My response was on the order of "well... reading is my addiction."
When I was an independant consultant I had the worst boss I've ever had in my life. I got no vacation days, he made me go to work when I was sick, and the bastard was on my ass all the time to find the next gig before the current one was up.
I will never by my own boss again, I'm an asshole.
harrased the crap out of them? That must be messy!
This has to be some sort of hoax. Aren't government employees in the States, or New York, unionised? If not, I apologise for my ignorance. I am a government employee in Canada. The most common way to fire me would be as part of a downsizing exercise and even in that case pains would be taken to transfer me elsewhere. The only other way would be to have a well documented case history of my incompentence. One game of solitaire just would not cut it. I don't know why anyone would put up with this and just shrug and say "oh well, he's the boss...you/he/I should shape up." You're reaction should be, damn...its time to get some organised labour up in here.
We were in the process of replacing our beloved VAXstations with high-end (60 MHz!) Pentium PCs running Windows 3.1. One of the big wigs was walking through the data center, and noticed a programmer playing Solotaire. He asks, "What is she doing?"
Your boss was absolutely correct in questioning why a programmer was in the data center.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
did this employee survive in NYC with 27K a year??!!
It is so trivially easy to remove or disable access to this sort of software, that it boggles the mind anyone would even consider trying to make an issue out of it.
Every morning, while my cow-orkers and bosses wasted half an hour getting coffee and talking about TV, I spent 10-15 minutes doing a serious mental workout playing Freecell. It helped me concentrate, and enabled me to better see the consequences of my actions, something very important when fixing bugs or adding features to legacy code. However, my boss's boss only saw that I was playing a game (one that he never could win, to my 25+ game streak), and forced me to stop. So my code quality dropped, but that was irrelevant. What mattered more was that I was seen to be working harder.
The company got bought out. He kept his job; I ended up homeless.
Lemon curry?
Under California law, your employee is required to give you two breaks during the day on the clock if you work an eight hour shift. At my last job they were so anal they tried to insist I clock out for my two breaks. Not only did I always ignore this demand, I printed out the part of the labor code that specified my break rights and posted it prominently.
Now I work at a better paying job where there is no time clock and my boss smokes more than me. When I take a smoke break, it's usually with my boss and we discuss work related issues. It improves our productivity (and we're sticking with that story).
-- Will program for bandwidth
Working is a transaction between an employer and an employee. Workers are not slaves and should not be treated as such. Just find another job is such a cop out, what if all jobs in a particular field suck, employers should have to conform to standards too, they shouldn't just act as if the employee is a possession of the company.
First off, the Mayor was right - not so much because the guy was playing solitare on company time, but because the guy was STUPID enough to leave the game up while the Mayor was in the office!
It's freekin' Bloomberg dude! Not only is he the Mayor, but he's a billionaire. And you can bet your ass that he didn't get there by playing fucken solitare on the PC. He got there thru hard work, on his part, and that of others (probably mostly others), and by keeping costs low.
Now someone playing around when they're being paid to work isn't working hard, and isn't keeping costs low. It's fucking around and costing the taxpayers money.
Since the Mayor is *SUPPOSED* to be the guy who has a fiduciary responsibility to the tax payers - he did the right thing in my book and shitcanned the guy.... Good riddance I say - and maybe the rest of the morons in the room will think twice before playing around...
Is this good for morale? Probably not, but hey - it sure as hell gets the point across... Lord knows that I've had some schmucks working for me who I know play solitare when they're supposed to be working and flat out lie when confronted with the evidence of usage... We have an agreement that the employees sign stating "NO GAMES", and they still do it... We tried fooling around with the warnings... didn't have any effect. What did have an effect was firing one violator... interestingly enough, after that - no more violators..... oh yeah, Bloomberg was spot on...
Yes, the question is why do so many americans fail to act in their own best interests?
Why do our domesticated cattle walk into our slaughterhouses, whereas their wild cousins will run from us?
Two major factors:
1. Our American culture is an evolved organism, evolved by elite propaganda to serve the elite.
This deals with the idea that a major part of what is inside the human brain is learned after birth. A large part of this learning is culture. Culture is therefore a large part of each human.
Culture is a set of ideas about what the world is supposed to be and how we are supposed to behave, among other things.
Culture is not necessarily a product of random chance. In fact, culture is like an animal in an ecosystem. Over generations, that species is shaped by environmental forces. Jsut as domesticated animals are evolved by humans over generations.
Hypothesis: American culture is a species of domesticated culture shaped and evolved by elite forces. Elite forces are force vectors in the form of ideas that are inserted into our culture by those entities and persons who are rich and powerful. The elite might be politicians, large corporations, political lobbies and interest groups, rich people, think tanks, large nonprofit foudnations, and mass media figures.
These elite shape our culture over decades to make it suit them. They are capital. We are labor. Our interests are for the most part, directly opposed.
So our culture has been domesticated by them to suit them, to be friendly to them.
The wolf would bite you or me. But your pet dog Rover will not.
This domestication of the american culture has mainly been effected though tv and radio.
And you see on this thread that Americans are on the side of the elite now. They are OWNED by the elite, ideologically.
Also, two other factors that help the elite control AMericans, mostly white Americans, is White Hating Identity Politics (WHIP) and Mass Immigration of Third Worlders (MIOTW).
The political left in america is controlled by the elite. It has been domesticated by them. It has been used by the elite to drive the largest bloc in America (the white lower middle class in general) away from leftism. They did this by foundation grant to liberal activists and writers etc that focus on identity politics, especially of a type that sees white people as irredeemably racist, and sees racism as something that is only associated with whites. Thus, whites, esp. lower middle class whites, are, by the tenets of WHIP, evil.
WHIP antagonizes whites against the Left, and drives them into the arms of the Right, which is the main tool of the elite.
Also, the Left in Ameica (actually the FAUXleft) has operated in conjunction with the Right to bring in large numbers of immigrants from third world nations with who look very different from white Americans. This is causing rapid change in America.
Rapid change causes people to react.
White Americans feel as if they are under siege. THey are circling the wagons. And thus they are more vulnerable to seduction by elite ideology.
That is why America has moved to the right.
I am making a documentary on this general subject.
See my sig for more....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
After years of overwork I was finially given an assistant to train who would help me at my engineering support position in a small company. He spent no more then 15 minutes a day eating a brown bag lunch and playing the ASCII version of startrek.
Unfortuentally, his desktop could be seen from the hallway and it happened the owner saw this game being played a number of times. He was reassigned away because "he did nothing but play computer games."
A short time later after getting an amazingly bad performace review I left the company and they hire 3 people (kid you not) to do my jobs (and kept me as a part time consultant for 6 months).
Yeah, here where I work, Slashdot is one of the VERY few nongovernment sites not blocked. Even some sites relavant to my work are banned. Even my personal webpage is blocked after two visits to it for links.
Someone save me from this sanity.
A few months ago I passed a NYC police car at night, and when I glanced in, I saw two police officers playing solitair. The next night, I passed ANOTHER police car with two cops doing the same thing. I went online, and searched for a bit, and found that yes, they WERE allowed to play it by policy during lunch and breaks. This implies it was probably general policy for the city, and as such, simply observing it on someone's desk is not grounds for termination.
heck, its on the favorites folder of all new network profiles, under "Industry News" I work for a cable provider owned by Paul Allen. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden