State-Sponsored Solitaire? 331
jefu writes "According to this story the state of North Carolina may be considering banning solitaire on state owned machines. It seems that state workers are now perceived as having replaced leaning on brooms with playing solitaire or minesweeper. The story provides coverage of both sides of the issue, noting that playing solitaire (or other games) may provide workers with a way to burn off some stress, but that this kind of activity is likely to be perceived as time wasting. My favorite bit (especially as April 15th draws ever closer) is where the author notes that fifty percent of the time an IRS employee is on the computer they are playing games, shopping online or gambling."
Mac OSX Tiger? (Score:1, Interesting)
Minesweeper (Score:4, Interesting)
90% of all statistics are made up on the spot... (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else wondering where this "research" was published?
huh (Score:1, Interesting)
This is assuming of course that the employees won't find something else to substitute the solitaire game Cell phone Tetris anyone? :)
Then again this is the same flawed logic that leads software manufacturers and the RIAA to claim that they are losing billions every year. Assuming that the people downloading the software and music would have bought those things to begin with. Politics as usual I guess.
Slackers Are a Management Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
That is, if an employee is not meeting expectations because he is spending too much time trolling the net, that's his fault, not the Internet's. The same problem would exist if he spent too much time doing crossword puzzles are talking to his girlfriend on the phone. The core problem is the employee not meeting expectations, not what he's doing to divert his attention.
As for Solitaire, don't install it, OK? And if a manager thinks someone is spending too much time playing online games or whatever, ask the IT guys to verify it and then do a bit of "counseling".
Now, if this guy really wanted to enhance productivity, he'd propose outlawing watching NCAA basketball playoffs at work. Heh.
The most important question (Score:4, Interesting)
Are these IRS employees paying the full amount of the tax due on their gambling winnings? It is considered income, after all.
Doh... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that it's bad to lose work time into games, but... really, what's worse? A worker who clears up his mind by playing sol 5 minutes, or a bored and tired worker who PRETENDS to be working but his productivity is actually half what it should be?
Bureaucracy...
Re:Thats so 90's! (Score:4, Interesting)
In Excel under file menu, do 'Save as Web Page'
Say 'Publish Sheet' and 'Add Interactivity'
Save to some htm page on your drive.
Load the htm page with IE. You should have Excel in the middle of the page.
Scroll to row 2000, column WC. Select row 2000, and tab so that WC is the active column.
Hold down Shift+Crtl+Alt nad click the Office logo in the upper-left.
Use the arrow keys to drive, space to fire, O to drop oil slicks, and when it gets dark, use H for your headlights.
Requires DirectX and Microsoft Office 2000 SP0.
If you update Office it will no longer work.
But Microsoft said (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah well, if Solitare and Minesweeper are removed, what will stop government employees from installing other games?
You boss, just wants to challenge you to a Doom 3 Deathmatch anyway.
Re:How can you 'ban' solitaire? Easy, fire employe (Score:3, Interesting)
1995, I was a contractor at an unnamed nuclear powerplant in Maryland. Windows 3.1 and all the BSD's we could stand. Solitaire was all the rage, and Management caught on.
One day the Solitaire shortcut doesn't work anymore, and a memo is circulated that "Game playing is bad...waste of resources...disciplinary action..." Stopepd us in our tracks? No (I mean, we are engineers for Chrissake)
Look for Sol.exe on machine...gone.
Search for "Solitaire" in shared drive...hmmm...that looks like some kind of script file in the root of the Network G: drive. Open it up - so it is: it checks user's machine at login and erases sol.exe. There is also a log in the directory: every instance of Solitaire being played on machines connected to that network for the last couple of months.
Solution to problem #1: reinstall Sol.exe, rename sol1.exe. No more logging.
Fun with the existing log:
"Hey Frank! (da boss)"
"What"
"You were playing Solitaire at exactly 1425 on March 3."
"Uh, how would you know that?"
"Big Brother is watching, Frank."
Solitaire and Boring Phone Calls (Score:3, Interesting)
For some people, it's more critical - my department used to have a secretary who played solitaire a lot. Her most important jobs were to keep track of the managers' appointments and answer their phones, and when she'd done any available paperwork, "answering their phones" meant "sitting around being bored", occasionally interrupted by people calling.
Re:Slackers Are a Management Problem (Score:1, Interesting)
I call bullshit on this being job-related reading. They're really just checking on their stock accounts and mutual fund performance.
Re:A scanner darkly (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the government has done a lot of good things. But it's only 'efficient' compared to corporations when corporations would require massive redundancy of huge systems (Three internets? Three highway systems?) to foster competition.
And yeah, gov. funding helps to develop new technologies. It takes a gov to make a phone system. But in situations where the government has to compete with several industries in competition with one another (say fedex vs. the post office) it's pretty consistently cheaper for the gov to farm out their work to the private (but not monopolitic) company.
Not going to stop anything.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, you want me to do remote support, BUY ME A LAPTOP. I spent my hard earned money on my machines, they are NOT to be used for my work. It's not like I am a independent contractor and have to pay for my own stuff. Oh and don't complain if I have images or other non work software on it either. You want me to do the support and take it home, then you better let me do what I want to do with it, within reason of course. You have my promise there will be no kiddie porn on it too. Start getting uppity and my laptop and my cell phone just may not make it with me on my next business trip.
There's no way you, the manager, does work all 8 of those hours either. IN fact, most managers are worse than employees or at least the same. Managers are constantly checking the stocks and the damn NCAA tourney or planning their next "business" trip to Las Vegas...shyeah. Take it easy on the employees, and when you really need them to do that extra 8 hours on Saturday, they just might say sure, I had nothing planned.
Re:This is STILL stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, even this wasn't enough. They decided that people were taking too much time between calls and abusing the aftercall status. Management, who in turn monitor the teams efficiency through a desktop application, decided that aftercall would switch off after 3 minutes and a new call would be put through automatically. This put her and the other call center staff in even more stressful situation where they couldn't even have a minute to recover after a stressful, difficult or administratively complicated incoming call.
Their machines are also locked down to dedicated applications, there is also some hardcore email monitoring going on when they chat to their work friends, on or off a call. Playing games is completely out of the question to the ~250 or so employees. It surely cannot help performance when they cannot escape from their jobs even for a moment. They are forced to work 100% of the time, or receive a rollocking.
She is very happy she's had an opportunity to move on to somewhere else now, but from her stories after work it seems that management are forced to trust the accurate stats generated by technology and use it as a benchmark to increase productivity. Staff are leaving left, right and center.. yet they look at their historical performance stats and decide that they weren't worth keeping anyway. Crazy.