Wasting Time

Suprisingly, the government wastes a lot of time.

Government Computer News is reporting that a 15-page Inspector General's report on time wasted by workers at the U.S. Department of the Interior has raised such a stir that the Dept.'s own servers have seen major slowdowns due to excessive downloads of the report.

The IG's report, entitled "Excessive Indulgences: Personal Use of the Internet at the Department of the Interior," estimates that an average of 104,221 work hours per year are wasted by DOI employees alone, simply by those perusing Internet gaming sites. The report cited thousands of collected logs from users' computers showing workers spending between eight and fourteen hours at a time on gaming sites.

There are two ways to look at this. First, give them even more ways to waste time so that they don't actually enforce any of the stupid regulations (or create new ones). Or, they have too much free time on their hands and start getting rid of headcount and reduce their budget.

The fact is - this probably is about par for the course. Americans that have access to computers, in general, spend a lot of time surfing. Shh. Don't tell anyone - I'm actually at work right now and don't get paid to blog.

I'm also not convinced that this is a new phenomena that spawned with the internet. I used to spend a lot more time chatting with co-workers and taking smoke breaks and other such nonsence than I do now. People have never hunkered down for 8 straight hours (minus official breaks) to work. Why anyone expects anything else from government escapes me.