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.'"
If they enforced this I think about 99% of the slashdotters would be fire. I know I'd be 0wned
I got you an Andes mint, but it melted in my pocket
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.
Topic hitting close to home - or am I really first?
If you can get fired for playing solitaire, then you can (and most likely will) get fired for anything. Some employers randomly fire people. It's unfortunate. Solitaire is just an excuse though. Excuses are easy to find.
Really now, don't you know that what you do at work WITH COMPANY RESOURCES is up to the (shock) COMPANY?
of the rest of the undeserving rich who haven't the slightest clue about how work gets done.
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.
Office assistant Edward Greenwood IX was going over some papers at his desk as Bloomberg made the rounds with his photographer, greeting workers and posing for pictures. When the mayor reached him, Greenwood stood, they shook hands and the photographer snapped a photo.
-- and --
"I expect all city workers, including myself, to work hard," the mayor said. "There's nothing wrong with taking a break, but during the business day, at your desk, that's not appropriate behavior."
Yep, workin' hard there, Mr. Mayor. Workin' hard.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Smoking. Co-workers that smoke use up far more time than those that blow off steam with Solitare. When you see an employee playing Enemy Territory, *then* you need to worry.
When you know the boss is going to be around, with reporters, why would you be playing a game on your computer? I'm sorry the guy lost his job, and yes, I think a reprimand would have been more appropriate, but still, he wasn't very bright.
The only question I have about the story is what kind of crappy job is there in the Mayor's office - that pays less than 30k a year - IN FRIGGING MANHATTAN? I guess he'll have to change jobs - and get to STOP EATING TOP-RAMEN.
... must be a Freecell fan.
Can we all agree that this guy is lying. Of course he played for more than a few minutes. We all have our necessary distractions. I browse Slashdot. My boss downloads hockey fights and forwards me Nigerian email scams (I kid you not!).
Every good manager knows that employees need a bit of time to themselves. Just look at Google's policy for working on personal projects and what a great benefit that policy is to both Google and its employees.
At my last job we had short Unreal Tournamet sessions one day a week and nakednews.com viewings in the morning, and everybody was really happy with their job. Everybody got a lot of great work done.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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?". A co-worker in the neighboring cube notices the situation and defuses the crisis by spewing a load of BS: "She's doing mouse calibration; they have you use this program, so the pointer on the screen can be aligned with the roller ball inside the mouse. It only takes a few minutes and it lines up the pointer for you."
Smokers take their 15 minute morning and afternoon breaks. And they will band together to ensure that no one imposes rules against them. Hell, unions have even been used to protect the glorious smoke break. But what about non-smokers? Ever since I quite smoking I have also quit taking 15 minute breaks. Now, when I need a break, I hit slash dot, check my email, and try to let my brain relax. So yeah, some hard ass could can me for "abusing web privledges", but I can point out to him how my web browsing is inplace of smoking, and by browsing the web I am saving him thousands of dollars in sick time and increased health insurance premiums.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
So let's get this straight. The guy works the same menial office job for six years, his salary was only $27,000, and Mayor Bloomberg fires him for taking a break during the workday at his desk, which according to the mayor was "not appropriate behavior."
... would you cry about it? I can't think of any greater favor Bloomberg could have done for this guy than to get him the fuck outta there.
I mean
Breakfast served all day!
Because all too often the modern workplace focuses more on appearance, propriety, and popularity - and less on true productivity and a healthy, relaxed environment.
I'm just amazed that Bloomberg has managed to completely revitalize the lower east side and stomp out crime in all the boroughs, and now has enough time on his hands to wander around snooping on his staff, looking for the evil sol.exe.
&laz;
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
I worked in a call center for more time than I would like to admit, and every month or so a new policy like this would come down the pipe.
As an act of civil disobedience I made solitare my wall paper, and removed all my icons.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
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!
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.
Fired For Reading Slashdot Article About Worker Who Was Fired For Solitaire At Work
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
We are all just people.
"...The Republican mayor stopped by the city's legislative office in Albany a few weeks ago ..."
Cost of living in Albany is considerably lower than NYC. 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.
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.
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
"Greenwood, who earned $27,000 a year and had worked in the office for six years" That's a crying shame he lost that high-paying job, maybe he can move up in the world and get a job at McDonalds. Seriously though, 6 years and he's making $27,000 and still has to deal with crap about playing solitaire once in awhile? Bloomburg needs to lighten up a little.
Somehow I doubt the managers who love to fire people for "time-theft" of this nature are busy 100% of the time they are at work, and aren't the kind who take 2 hour lunches and skip out early on Fridays when they please. The more management creates and enforces rules against the most minute off-task behavior, the more their flagrant flaunting of such rules negatively impacts morale.
The human mind is not designed to stay on one task for hour after hour without a few minutes of mental downtime, and failing to recognize this and not to simply expect productivity, but blind mechanical function in a sentient being is not only wrong but fails to deliver the intended results.
It's a sad state of affairs when you realize that many people in their position tend to have a more anthropomorphic view of their pets than their employees.
... are allowed to take a 5-10 minute break every hour in order to get their fix? Is someone waiting outside to fire them for wasting time?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
"But Mr. Ford! You can't fire me!"
"Why the hell not?"
"I don't work for you! I work for the phone company!"
I was walking down the street here in NYC and noticed a police van with the door open. Looked in and saw one of those nifty in-car laptops...
Yup, they had left their Windows Solitaire game up on the screen.
Why should an operating system's default install include games in the first place? Especially a professional edition? Besides, isn't it unfair competition against other game vendors?-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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).
It's the prototypical big mean rich republician squashes the innocent little poor guy news piece. It's meant to incite class envy and to increase a reader base for the reporter/news agency. Here's more...
...But the eagle-eyed mayor - a billionaire former businessman with a certain idea of how offices should be run - noticed Greenwood's game of solitaire glowing on his screen...
..."It's not like I'm the only one that ever did this," said the 39-year-old father of a toddler.
>
>
Back in 1998 I was working in a helpdesk and a user who was known to be a chronic complainer called saying that she couldn't do her work as there was something wrong with MS Word. We were able to remote control workstations without users having to give permission so I connected to her workstation and what did I see?? Solitaire. Rather than let her know I could see what she was doing I kept asking her about her screen and what she could see on it - all she was doing was giving me ficticious error messages and she was actually continuing her game while she was talking to me. How I resolved the problem was to move her cards around for her and then open MS Office. Once it was open I asked her if there were any other problems she wanted to talk about. After a long silence she said "No- thank you for helping me" and hung up the phone. Needless to say we didn't hear anything from her for a while.
User training. Teaching new users how to use a mouse and the basic operations of a GUI. It may seem archaic now, but think back when everyone was switching from DOS/WordPerfect/Lotus-123 to Windows.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I also lost an office job a long while back. They never gave me a reason when they told me it "wasn't working out", but I've learned the details about it recently. Turns out the reason was because the logs showed that I surfed the Internet "three times" in one day. Non-coincidentally, my two coffee-breaks and one lunch break add up to having a break "three times" a day.
It's such total BS that I'm tempted to call the union, but I won't. The job sucked, and I'm glad to have it behind me.
Not that I entirely disagree with you, but a guy who worked at the same job in NYC for 6 years and was only making $27,000/yr was not exactly part of their brain trust.
Many entry-level retail employees in NYC make $27,000/yr.
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.
To bad the didnt say the whole story . It was in newsday. HE was underperforming.
Also that office was getting downsized.
That was just the icing on the cake. He was not fired unjustly.
Boy to people overreact
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!
Policy or not its an At Will state just like most of the rest of the country and since the firing isn't because of any protected reason (race, sex, age, etc) then he's out of luck. Shit they could have fired him because they thought he talked too much or they didnt like the way he was looking at them. Right or wrong doesnt really matter when at-will rules the workforce today. Doesnt matter if there was a computer use policy or not. Sucks but its the law of the land for 49 states...
And good luck trying to prove wrongful termination in court without blatent supporting evidence.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
did this employee survive in NYC with 27K a year??!!
Besides, he got fired from a 27K job, in New York. How hard could that be to replace?
For someone with 6 years of Solitare experience?
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Solitaire is always going to get you in trouble because it's so recognizable.
"Who the hell's going to argue with that? Seriously?Who the hell's going to argue with that? Seriously?"
Me.
I guess I'm unusual.
Terry Pratchett once observed that cows are herded by men that, if the cows every thought about it, the cows could convert into a damp smear on the ground in two seconds.
But the cows never think about it. They are cows. Rebellion never crosses their minds, so they let the pink monkeys herd them into slaughterhouses.
(plaitive tone) why are we all cows? people died for over a hundred years to create unions so that employers couldn't treat people like peons on a feudal estate. Why do you hate yourselves so much?
If there is software he's not supposed to be using while he's at work, why is it even installed? It is quite simple to supress the installation of all of the "Games". How's this for logic, Mr Smarty Pants Mayor...If you don't want your employees playing games, DON'T INSTALL THEM....DUH!!!! I really don't see why an employee should be fired for using software that you provided him with, even if it is a game.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
No, they fought for the right to form unions so they wouldn't have to working physically backbreaking jobs 14 hours a day seven days a week for a pittance. Nobody died to get the right to slack off in front of the bossman, in lieu of performing their cushy duties.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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?
Totally ridiculous. When you're at work, you can only focus on your daily duties for so long.
Even the most concentrated employees have to look up Slashdot or their favorite news site at some point for some well-earned distraction. And why? Because it makes you work better afterwards!
I do this often and I'll thankfully never be fired for it, given the size and type of the company that I work at (graphic design and web development studio), but I don't think that company size has any correlation to the usefulness of a little bit of distraction every now and then.
...on my Treo, while using the bathroom. At work. No one's complained so far.
Of course, if I get my work done for the day, then it's Warcraft time...
No, not on the Treo.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I would say it is borderline entrapment if you install "illegal" software on someone's computer and bust them when they start to use it...
goverment allows me to have a car that goes 130mph, but busts me when I do so on 55mph zone.
I'm allowed to have a gun, but get busted doing something illegal with it.
I'm living in a free world, having free will. If I know something to be illegal or against policies it is up to me to choose what I want to do. I may break the law/policies as much as I want to, but I have to face penalties if being coucht.
Oh come on.
Plain and simple, what you do at work must be within the guidelines of your employer and its computer usage policy.
You wouldn't bring up quake, even for just a single frag, so why do people think it's suddenly okay to pull up solitaire, hearts, or the latest java/flash game from third party Web sites? The employer couldn't care less that you wanted only a single frag, playing games is probably against their computer policy, and this person is a clear violator of it. You wouldn't pull out a deck of cards either and start playing a game on your desk, though that'd be more of a company policy than a computer and company policy.
So this is simply that someone didn't follow the rules and is now whining. Some employers are a bit more lax during lunch hours, and that's okay, but you should never just assume that the employer will be okay with you checking personal mail, surfing the net, or playing games during lunch.
I'm sure what happened in more detail is a boss walked by a few times in a week at varying times (11, 2p, 3p, etc) and saw half the time that this person was playing games instead of working. The employer has every right to kick them out. They're on someone elses dollar, so they damn-well be worth it
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
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).
Believing in a rigid class structure is simply an incorrect mindset that feeds itself the poison you've spewed in your comment. It would certainly help to achieve your aims, because a leftist society requires a rigid class structure to keep the workers in line, but what you're talking about is wishful thinking, not a valid observation.
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.
This is only in a society where there is enforced stratification, which isn't the case at all. Anyone, with proper application of willpower, can bring themselves into the level of the so-called elite. No one has a magic barrier preventing this. Only people who refuse to raise themselves up are stuck.
And anyway, if you thinks American culture is driven by a so-called elite you obviously haven't noticed any popular entertainment over the last fifteen years.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
One fine day, after installing Microsoft SMS 2.0, I wanted to try out the 'server licensing' feature; install software on each computer, tell SMS how many licenses you actually have, and it lets only that many copies run at a time, queues people up, and so on.
I decide to test it on Solitare; so I tell the thing that only one copy of sol.exe is allowed to run, fire a copy up on my desktop, try firing it up on my laptop, and sure enough, the laptop gets a message.
A few minutes later, over comes one of the Vice Presidents, asking me to kindly turn Solitare back on.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.