Pac-Man recently had a special day.  The video game icon was celebrating the 30th anniversary of the launch of his iconic video game in Japan, and on May 21, Google made Pac-Man a special logo that contained a playable version of the video game.  Pretty cool, right?  Well, I thought so, and apparently so did a lot of other people.  The BBC reports that the time tracking software firm Rescue Time reports that Google Pac-Man ate up nearly 550 years of worker productivity.

That one day of Google Pac-Mania caused the average Google user to linger on the homepage for an extra 36 seconds (depending on how good at Pac-Man they are).  Rescue Time says most people conduct 11 Google searches a day on average; extrapolating those numbers out, given an average salary of $25, Google Pac-Man cost employers a grand total of $120 million dollars of productivity.

We just might have a new most unproductive day of the year, thanks to Google’s May 21 stunt!  Of course, odds are that those 36 seconds weren’t being used productively anyway, but that’s kind of beside the point.  The point is, for one day, everyone had Pac-Man Fever again!

Tags: Google, Google Pac-Man logo, Pac-Man, flash games, Pac-Man game ruined worker productivity, Rescue Time, lost worker productivity, video games, distracting games

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