Each day that I buy lunch from the cafe, I pass the office of a woman who works for another company. Every time I pass her window at lunchtime, she's playing computer solitaire.

I don't know the rules of her company, nor do I care. It's presumably her lunch break, so I don't have a problem with the fact that she likes to relax with a game. It's her choice of game that bothers me. Computer solitaire is so lackluster and old school (not Pac Man old school, 14.4 modem old school). If you're going to chill out during lunch, why not at least get some entertainment value from it?

I realize few offices advocate lunch-hour intraoffice Quake tournaments, (if you work in one of those offices, please let me know where to send my resume), but she could at least check out the multiplayer poker at Yahoo! Games or catch up on her online reading with an ebook from Fictionwise. Anything seems better than that monotonous jumble of cards being sorted into piles.

In high school, I spent a summer at my father's pool filter manufacturing plant, where an assistant to the VP spent her entire day playing computer solitaire. I would walk near her desk to file things and she would panic and click to a spreadsheet. But it only takes the human eye a fraction of a second to recognize a pattern and I could see it was solitaire before it changed.

I didn't then, nor do I understand now, the attraction of that inane game. Perhaps if it was SimCity or Diablo II, I could sympathize. But I haven't found a way of concealing the screams of dying Stygian Dogs or the intermittent reports of Sim Copter One so that I could play either of those games at work.

I think the woman by the cafe may have noticed that I stare at her electronic card game because she recently turned her monitor to face away from the window. The angle isn't quite right though, and I can still see her daily round of freewheeling solitaire fun.