Final Tab: Pac-Man on Google Wasted 4.8 Million Hours
It might not sound like a lot on first glance, but the 36 extra seconds that the average Google.com visitor spent there last Friday playing Pac-Man adds up to a massive 4.8 million wasted hours.
According to a study by RescueTime, Pac-Man on Google--the search giant on Friday replaced its home page logo with a playable version of the iconic game--cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 man-hours and a whopping $120,483,800 in lost productivity. As RescueTime put it, you could hire every single Google employee, including co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, and get them for six weeks for that much money.
Still, it's hard to get too worked up over 36 extra seconds of time someone might have spent on Google.com. After all, how much time does the average person spend not doing work when other time-sucks come along, like presidential elections, sports championships, "Lost" finales, the death of celebrities like Michael Jackson and so on. Clearly, that number is an average, and so it masks that fact that some people probably lost most of their day Friday to Google's remake of the 30-year-old game.
