Stung by Solitaire

Is anyone else really pissed off at Mayor Mike for this move? From today's NYTimes:

Edward Greenwood IX was fired Jan. 30 from his job as an assistant in the city's lobbying office in Albany, not long after the mayor spied the game on his computer screen during a Jan. 4 visit to the state capital.

Mr. Greenwood, 39, said he was dismissed with no notice, and no severance pay, after working there for six years. He earned about $27,000 a year for duties that included sending legislative bills to city agencies and copying and circulating office memos.

Mr. Bloomberg confirmed yesterday that Mr. Greenwood's firing offense was the game of solitaire, saying that city employees were not paid to play at the workplace. The firing was first reported yesterday by The New York Post.

"I expect all city workers — including myself — to work hard," Mayor Bloomberg said during a news conference in Midtown Manhattan. "There's nothing wrong with taking a break but during the business day at your desk, that's not appropriate behavior."

Now, I'm not disagreeing that it totally sucks to have the big boss find out you've been playing solitaire on the job. I can't say "come on, everybody does it" about solitaire per se, because playing solitaire as a time-wasting pasttime has, in my experience, been replaced by the post-millenial time-wasting pasttime of blogging, reading blogs, general websurfing, and IM'ing. And who doesn't engage in one of those activities at work at some time or another? I see all my readers' hits from my sitemeter, and unless a large chunk of my readership actually live in various and sundry law firms, corporations, small businesses, and even (gasp) a varied representation of government offices all over the United States - I know that Greenwood isn't alone. And even if he was the only one unlucky enough to actually get caught, is this a proper response on Bloomberg's part? I appreciate the mayor's take-no-prisoners approach when it comes to playing tough with the Transit Workers Union, for example, but this is just too much. Why make an example of this guy when he has been at the job for so long? He wasn't even caught in the act of playing solitaire - it just happened to be on his screen when it was seen by the mayor:

Mr. Greenwood said yesterday that he always finished his work in a timely fashion, and that he played solitaire only when there was nothing else left to do, usually a few times a week or during lunch breaks.

"Any and all work I had to do, I did with a passion," he said. "If I have a stack of things to be done, I'm not the kind of guy to put it off."

Mr. Greenwood said that he had left the solitaire game on his computer while going to pick up tickets for the mayor and other city officials to attend the governor's annual address to the state. When he returned, Mr. Greenwood said, the mayor had arrived and was posing for pictures with other office workers.

I mean, can anyone really argue that an employee's playing a mindless game of solitaire while eating lunch - or even on a business phone call - is an offense that calls for the perpetrator's termination? I know I can't. This sucks. It sucks for Greenwood, and it sucks for the mayor. Because my opinion of him has changed, and I'll bet I'm not the only one.