Under the wire: Playing with yourself

Red nine on black 10. Apparently there are moves afoot in the US, the Greatest Democracy On Earth™, to ban the Solitaire and Minesweeper games that come pre-installed on every machine running Windows. More specifically, lawmakers wish to ban the games from computers running Windows in government offices.

Black six on red seven. The catalyst for the move is Senator Austin Allran (his real name), a Republican from North Carolina, who says that as much as half the time that government employees spend on their computers is spent playing games.

He also claims that considerable time is spent in shopping, online gambling and downloading pornography. It must be fun to work for the government in North Carolina.

Red ace to home. Black queen on red king. The evidence to back his claims comes from studies done in such government agencies as the Internal Revenue Service (tax dollars at work), the Insurance Processing Bureau and the Meat Grading and Certification section of the Agriculture department.

Why employees in such jobs would need any kind of distraction from the glamorous, fast-paced excitement of their daily work is beyond me.

Black 10 to red jack, red jack to black queen. It’s a fair question to ask, though. Back in the days before everyone’s job involved a computer, these folks would be paper-shuffling pencil-pushers for whom excitement would have meant a trip to the water cooler to gossip about Leave It To Beaver.

Back then government employees were not issued with decks of cards; you just did your work. Have all the excitement you want at home.

Black four to red five. Didn’t I have a six here somewhere?

Nowadays everyone – everyone – is issued with a computer as soon as they get a bureaucratic job somewhere, and thanks to the visionaries at Microsoft that computer has Solitaire and Minesweeper already installed. I read somewhere that the excellent Solitaire game was the main reason for the rise in popularity of Windows 3.1 over Windows 3.0 (which didn’t have Solitaire). I’d like to think that was not true.

Ah, there it is. Red five to black six. The question is, how do you ban Solitaire? Would they write into government purchasing contracts that the games must be removed on installation? Would Microsoft have to come up with a ‘bureaucrat safe’ version of Windows sans games?

What’s to stop people downloading third-party Solitaire games? Would the government have to create a department responsible for policing the new law and removing offending leisure software from people’s computers? What happens if those guys get drawn into the Solitaire trap? They’ll have to be drawn from elite enforcement officials, like Eliot Ness’s Untouchables.

Black two to red three, red three to black four. There is of course a larger issue here – larger even than the privacy and personal freedom of the individuals subsumed by these faceless government offices who now look like having their one moment of joy each day, be it clearing the deck or finding all the mines and surviving, eradicated.

The issue is that these computers were supposed to make us more productive, make our jobs easier, so that we could enjoy more leisure time. That’s why we bought them. What happened to that? Who’s to say the amount of work being done in non-Solitaire time isn’t still greater than what was getting done before we bought the computers?

Red seven on black eight. Of course the law will never be passed. It would have to be drafted first, and the secretary responsible is in the middle of a game.

Black eight on red nine, black two on red ace. Done. Now, back to work.

Matthew JC Powell is not playing with a full deck. Deal with him on mjcp@optusnet.com.au.