Among all of the stories of employees fired for blogging, you may have missed this one. Sixty-three-year-old programmer Charles Smith was terminated from his job at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services because of his screen saver.

Smith was running the the screen saver from the UC Berkeley-run Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The “distributed computing” software sends chunks of data to people running the screen saver to crunch data the organization can’t afford to crunch internally. SETI@home has been downloaded by about 4 million people—including Smith, who only ran the software when his PC was idle, on weekends and between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.

The department’s director, Tom Hayes (clearly a people person) said, “I understand his desire to search for intelligent life in outer space, because obviously he doesn’t find it in the mirror in the morning.” He added, “I think that people can be comfortable that security has beamed this man out of our building.’‘

If the Department had a clearly communicated policy about installing unapproved software, that’s one thing. (You’d think a programmer would be aware of such a policy.) If it’s just a matter of a cynical director acting without benefit of a clearly communicated policy, that’s another, and it speaks to the need to ensure employees know what they can be fired for. I’m not privy to the facts, but from what I read, it seems to be Director Hayes who’s living on another planet.