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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.
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.