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.'"

Re:Bloomberg thus joins the ranks

[LennyDotCom]

Udeserving rich?

Michael R. Bloomberg is the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. He was born on February 14, 1942 to middle class parents in Medford, Massachusetts, where his father was the bookkeeper at a local dairy. Mayor Bloomberg's thirst for information and fascination with technology was evident at an early age, and led him to Johns Hopkins University, where he parked cars and took out loans to finance his education. After his college graduation, he gained an MBA from Harvard and in the summer of 1966, he was hired by Salomon Brothers to work on Wall Street.

Your just a looser who is jelous of someone that worked thier way to the top

It wasn't in Manhattan

[PCM2]

The guy didn't work in New York, he worked at the Albany [wikipedia.org] city legislative office. The median income for a male living in Albany is ~$31,000.

Re:Another reason to smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

Smokers take their 15 minute morning and afternoon breaks.

More like their 10 minute early morning break, 10 minute late morning smoke break, 10 minute pre lunch smoke break, 10 min post lunch smoke break, 10 min early afternoon break and 10 minute late afternoon break. Many, perhaps most, smokers habbit is far to consuming to go hours without a smoke.

Re:Paid for 8 hours work or to be present for 8?

[Gyorg_Lavode]

People need breaks. I know when I was working hourly I legally had half an hour for lunch and a few 15min breaks reguardless of what the company said.

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.

Whoa, that's a tough pill to swallow

[AaronPSU777]

"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.

Re:Not NYC - Albany

[NormalVisual]

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.

No, what it said was, "The mayor's office said its records show that in 2004 Greenwood reviewed the policy that prohibits "inappropriate" use of city computers." That means that they gave everyone a written copy of the AUP and had everyone sign something saying they received a copy of it and read it, something that practically everyone that works in an office of any size does in this day and age. It doesn't in any way imply that he'd broken the rules at any time.

Also lost my job.

[Gunslinger47]

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.

Re:Solitaire Schmolitaire

[laing]

This reminds me of the old SUN3 workstations. There was almost no security. You could remotely log into another machine, do a "screendump" to an NFS shared partition, and then do a "screenload" on your local workstation to see what anyone was doing anywhere. We used it to look at the managment plan to outsource our entire division to another state and knew about the plan 2 weeks before it was announced.

Re:Bloomberg thus joins the ranks

[zorander]

Bloomberg build one of the largest privately held companies from the world from the ground up. His coworkers, some of whom I know, testify whenever possible as to the sweat and intensity he put into the business and how wonderful he was to work for. The benefits offered at his company are among the best in the industry. It's hard to accuse him of not understanding how work gets done or how to/not to treat employees in light of what he's accomplished in his life, in particular from a management perspective.

Also, if the employee were so indispensible, I assume his manager would have defended him and done whatever possible to give him another chance. Honestly, if the man got fired by a chance remark, even coming out of Bloomberg's mouth, he probably was on the line already for other reasons.

should have tried nethack

[valdean]

Nethack is the best game to play at work... no one has a clue what you're doing. Bloomberg wouldn't have even blinked.

Solitaire is always going to get you in trouble because it's so recognizable.

Re:Good!

[heinousjay]

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.

Re:Terms of use

[Syberghost]

I'm sorry, but at this point, one's work history is irrelevant. There have been so many people fired for playing games that playing a game at work, even if it complies with the written words of your company's policies, is such an act of monumental stupidity that it marks the offender as someone with such colossaly bad judgement that they are clearly not to be trusted making decisions for your business, at any level.

I mean, you KNOW this will probably get you fired, you KNOW that people can see you doing it from across the room, through the door, and down the hall, and you KNOW that no court is going to make things "right" if you do, because a jury is unlikely to be composed of 12 people with ADD who understand the concept that you can play solitaire and still get 5 times as much work done as anybody else.

So, if you play solitaire at work on your main PC where everybody can see, you're a dumbass who needs to be fired because what other horrible lapses of judgement are you going to inflict upon your employer?

Get a laptop and go into a conference room, facing toward the door. Duh.

Violate guidelines; would you do one quake frag?

[PhYrE2k2]

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