I ran across this story this evening. It claims that North Carolina taxpayers would be outraged if they knew how many hours are wasted by state employees playing solitaire on state computers.

But don’t worry about me. Although I am a North Carolina state employee, I use a Mac. The Mac doesn’t come with these types of distractions. Well, it does come with Chess installed by default.

The article says that legislators want to have games similar to and including solitaire removed from state owned computers. While this might fix the problem of employees playing solitaire, this solution fails to address the real issue. As I see it, the problem is not that employees are wasting time. The problem is that they have no work to do in the first place.

Perhaps the state legislature already knows this. This might explain the lack of state employee raises in the past few years. Could the state legislature be trying to trim down the excess positions within the state? This method would seem to be more effective than uninstalling solitaire on state computers. Not only could state employees turn to online game sites, which offer a plethora of games – including solitaire, but they may just find other unique ways to pass the hours away.

If the goal of the state legislature is to weed out lazy employees in an effort to give the state tax payers “more for their money”, the best solution, as I see it, is to reduce the budgets of state agencies.

Instead, by choosing to emphasize the uninstallation of solitaire on state computers, I must conclude that their goal is something else. Perhaps their goal is to raise public awareness of this particular issue? It’s all speculation.

One goal, however, is certain: To be re-elected. Perhaps in some way, they see this as a way to obtain that goal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 11:17 pm and is filed under computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.