Last Friday, Google celebrated the 30th birthday of a very special celebrity: PAC-MAN. Google’s logo appeared in the form of a very wide level of the famous arcade game. It wasn’t just a static logo — clicking on the image or choosing the “Insert Coin” option below the search bar would begin an actual game of PAC-MAN. Clicking on the Insert Coin button a second time would allow Ms. PAC-MAN to join the game. You can still find the playable logo here.

While the gesture was a nice nod to an influential video game character, some people have pointed out it may have had a negative impact. According to the BBC, a software firm called Rescue Time estimates the average visit to Google lasts about 11 seconds. But when the PAC-MAN logo was active, the average stay lasted 36 seconds longer than usual. Since Google receives more than 504 million visitors each day, Rescue Time did the math and said this meant people stayed on Google for 4.8 million hours more than on a normal day.

Rescue Time took it a step further. The company assumed that the average person’s hourly wage is around $25 per hour. That means that around $120 million worth of time was wasted playing PAC-MAN. Can that be true?

I call shenanigans. First, the original study focused on 11,000 Rescue Time software users. That sounds like a big number, but to extrapolate their behavior across 504 million Google visitors is questionable. And not all the people who are visiting Google are at work. Many of them might not have a job at all. But more importantly than that, the $120 million figure presupposes that people are working every second of every day when they are on the clock. That’s just not true.

C. Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian and professor, made an observation that he called Parkinson’s Law. The observation was that work will fill the amount of time a person has to do that work. In other words, if you have a project that’s due on Friday, work for that project will fill up that time. If that same project is due at the end of the month, work for that project will fill up all that time. The complexity and importance of a project changes depending upon how much time a person has to do the job.

I’m willing to bet that there was no measurable loss of money due to users playing PAC-MAN during work hours. Workers still completed projects, filled out reports and did everything else they were supposed to do. I’m sure some projects were late, but I’m also sure they would have been late even without the PAC-MAN distraction.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a high score I need to beat.

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