The Union Rep Ain’t Playing Games, Either

I guard a building for the US government.

We have a little tiny breakroom in which we take two fifteen-minute breaks and one thirty-minute break per day. There are government-owned computers in the breakroom. They are capable of browsing the Internet, including YouTube.

One day, during my break, I’m watching a Let’s Play on YouTube of a very new, next-gen, graphically intense video game. It was only released about a month ago.

My manager notices me watching the game during the break, and decides that I must, somehow, be playing the game. It’s not just against the rules to install video games on government computers; it’s literally illegal.

So, he fires me with no warning and no opportunity to explain myself. Fortunately, I have a union. My union representative first pries the reason for my firing out of my manager, which takes more work than it’s supposed to. Then, he hears my side of the story. Then, he requests my reinstatement. Reason: the game isn’t installed on the computer and there’s no proof I was playing it.

This is when the tomfoolery begins. First, after IT confirms that the game isn’t on the computer, my manager argues that I must have installed the game on the computer and uninstalled it when I knew I was caught.

We respond that there’s been no increase in network traffic needed to install a game like that. The manager argues that we installed it by CD drive or USB.

We offer to take the computer in question and prove that the game won’t even install on it, let alone run on it, but my manager won’t provide access to the computer in question, so instead, we subpoena IT for the computer’s stats and build a replica of it. We then clearly prove that the game’s install program will refuse to install it on the computer and that the computer can’t even run the game.

This, finally, is proof enough that I wasn’t playing video games on the work computer. I am reinstated, with back pay, and the government is forced to foot the bill of the union’s lawyer, the union building the replica computer to prove that the game couldn’t install on it, and the cost to license a copy of the game so that they could attempt to install it to prove it wouldn’t work.

After all this, my union rep gifted me the license to the copy of the game that the union bought! So that was nice.