“Eh, Myrna, you pau the compliance report on the compliance reports?”

“Yeah, yeah. Pretty soon. But first I like watch the second season of ‘Walking Dead.’ Getting to the scary part.”

“K, den. Let me know when you get ’em. I going be in the back room with Clarence watching ‘Wicked Tuna.’”

Reporter Kristen Consillio’s scoop on the front page of Thursday’s paper gave credence to every snarky joke about state workers: that they’re not doing their jobs, they’re just passing time until retirement, that they complain about roadblocks when they’re the ones blocking the road.

Consillio got her hands on a memo from the state Department of Human Resources Development scolding employees for using state computers, the state server and state time to download audio, video and image files. It starts out with the dreaded phrase “It has come to our attention.”

(You know when you get a memo that starts that way, somebody got busted.)

“It has come to our attention that employees accessing the Internet to access Netflix, Hulu and other streaming media sites through their state assigned computers during work time.”

(OK, that sentence needs a verb … but maybe it got lost due to slow Internet speed.)

A second memo four days later from the Office of Information Management and Technology announced, “In order to preserve sufficient online access for State business, we will be immediately blocking video streaming services (including but not limited to Netflix and Hulu) on the State Network.”

The 20,000 state workers in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government got the memo. This does not include the DOE or UH, which both have their own networks — so any thought that these are legit uses like teachers streaming “Magic School Bus” on the last day of class or professors showing their favorite TED talks doesn’t explain the implications. Picture people sitting behind 1970s dented metal desks. Twenty-thousand of those guys got the memo.

One obvious question is how state workers got their notoriously ancient computers to stream anything. Anecdotally, much of the technology that sits on those old metal desks are as old as the desks.

According to the Office of Information Management and Technology, the rampant Netflixing wasn’t bogging down online access to state government. In a one-week period from July 28 to Aug. 4, Netflix and Hulu combined used less than 0.2 percent of available bandwidth. But still. Come on.

Now that they can’t watch movies at work, perhaps there are other things state workers can do on the job, like Sudoku. Or texting old flames they reconnected with on Facebook. Or adding an extra smoke break. Or maybe they could just do their jobs.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.