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?
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.
... 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."
The problem isn't that it's not within their rights (in my state, we have at-will employment and you can be fired for damn near anything). The problem is that some employers fail to recognize that eight full hours of productivity isn't a realistic goal. In this case, he claims to use solitaire for a "quick distraction." When I'm stuck on a problem, I take a walk, play a game of Sudoku, or check Slashdot. Sometimes it's a change of scenery that refreshes me. Other times its simply a change of perspective. In either case, it's important to realize that any employee who consistently claims to be productive for 100% of his time is lying.
I've worked for employers that didn't understand this. Burnout and turnover rates were astonishingly high. Meanwhile, I've worked for employers that recognized the value of this kind of freedom/flexibility. They also realized the non-value of an employee that needs to get away.
Solitaire/minesweeper/Sudoku or the occasional "why don't you go home early" often translates to a refreshed and more productive employee tomorrow.
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
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.
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
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.