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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.'"
that get posted to the front page of slashdot.
In other news, earth is round.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
If you work for a private company, you are allowed 30 minutes every five hours if you are getting paid hourly. If you are civil service union employee, you get 30 minutes for a 6 to 7.5 hour work day, typcially. I don't know where you live, but none of the public buildings in my state allow smoking in or near the premises. Stop bringing this up as a comparison. None of the smokers I know at work are unproductive, nor do they take an excessive amount of leave time. In fact, they tend to be nervous people who don't like to go home unless things are "just right".
I see an awful lot of speculation, but as of this point in the replies, I don't see anyone remotely aware of how it's like to work in the heavily unionized public sector. I'm a public sector employee, and likely in the same union as this guy. It is *very* hard to get fired. There are allowances for just about everything. About the only way to get fired is to break the law, or to disobey a direct order from your superiors. Even if there is the possibility you could hurt yourself, you at least have to try.
This guy obviously continued to disobey an order, and he likely had more than one warning that goofing off with games during regular work hours is against policy. My guess is that his supervisor specifically told him not to do it when Bloomberg made his visit, but he did it anyway. Honestly, this guy's supervisor must have been completely humiliated about this.
I know that smoking is a mortal sin according to the current Edicts of the Church of Socialism, but I've been around long enough, and worked a variety of jobs to know that workers don't need a cigarette in their hand to be soldiering. I see plenty of time-wasting going on, whether it be gabbing on the phone, conducting business on eBay, chewin' the rag by the ol' water cooler, purposely finding any reason to walk (slowly) out of the office to pick up or deliver various items, or reading a book -- The heavy overhead of socialism is making it a hell of a lot harder to do nothing and still collect a high wage.
Any job application / report to a customer / business proposal instantly loses its authority in the eyes of the recipient if said recipient detects a spelling or grammatical error. Think about that before applying the sarcasm on with a trowel next time.
Usually because narrow minded individuals such as yourself fail to see past one simple error. Are you proud of the fact that you would disregard any job applicant or proposal because of such trivialities? Food for thought. I mean if it is full of mistakes, I understand, but one. However it is 3 in the morning, sure i mispelled something, so please disregard. Idiot
Seig Heil.
From TFA, they describe him as an "Office Assistant". On a whim, I went over to Monster and plugged in a search for "Office Assistant" in the Albany area. Here's a representative sample of what came back: Office Assistant Job Description.
For everybody complaining about "thought breaks" and the like, this guy was NOT being paid to think deeply... he was being paid to do things like answer the phone... file, fax, and copy... type correspondence, etc. I don't mean to be disrespectful here, but the guy was doing a $13.50 an hour job that doesn't look like it's exactly going to put a lot of stress on the mental faculties. How much of a "thought break" does he need?
If typing, filing, copying, and faxing is too much for him, I'm sure there's plenty of candidates who would be happy to step in and take over; We're not talking about skilled labor or a highly trained technical person here... this is a pretty basic, straightforward job.