November 15, 2005

THINK OF ALL THE TIME IT TAKES AWAY FROM SOLITAIRE:

On the job, it's all about 'team work' (BRIAN HEYMAN, November 12, 2005, THE JOURNAL NEWS)

The estimate is that 32.2 million men and women are playing the fantasy game this season, and it's a game that's about more than just watching on Sundays and Monday nights. Many aren't just talking about it. Many are devoting some of their natural downtime during the workday to the business of running their fantasy teams or leagues. There are also those devoting a bit of time when they could be working.

A firm has actually done a study on all this.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which is involved with the outplacement of executives, claims that nearly $200 million worth of productivity is being fumbled away nationally with each typical daily 10-minute span spent hard at work on these football fantasies.

The study revealed the average player to be a 30-something man with a college education and a white-collar job that brings in $76,000 a year. So that comes out to $6.09 of pay per 10 minutes.

Multiply by 32.2 million, and that comes out to $196.1 million.


Of course, if you're a white collar male earning that much money your job pretty much entails nothing useful anyway, so time not wasted on fantasy football is just wasted on something else.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 15, 2005 12:54 PM
Comments

Gee, thanks OJ. Now I don't feel so bad when spending countless hours setting my lineup every week while at work.

Posted by: BJW at November 15, 2005 1:14 PM

Sadly, a law office is ill-suited for undisturbed contemplation of the True, the Good and the Beautiful on somebody else's dime, so I must be content with lesser truths, lesser goods, lesser beauties. Spring training can't come soon enough.

Posted by: Random Lawyer at November 15, 2005 1:17 PM

The great thing abouty the legal profession is that you can bill the time wasted.

Posted by: oj at November 15, 2005 1:36 PM

oj wrote: "if you're a white collar male earning that much money your job pretty much entails nothing useful anyway"

Hmmm. Have any experience in that area oj? What was that saying about people in glass houses?

Posted by: Bret at November 15, 2005 2:15 PM

Bret:

Of course. The first 10,000 pages of this website were written at "work."

Posted by: oj at November 15, 2005 2:26 PM

Time that otherwise might be spend on holding meetings, demanding status reports, asking for implementation of the hype-of-the-week from the latest trade rag, etc. Those leagues save american companies millions in unnecessary overhead.

Posted by: Daran at November 15, 2005 3:24 PM

I was Orrin's cube-mate for a few years and I can attest that, not only did he rarely do a lick of work, he had a negative effect on the productivity of those around him. He could have been management if only he had wanted it!

Posted by: Bryan at November 15, 2005 5:07 PM

And the beauty of it is we had the most productive team on the floor....

Posted by: oj at November 15, 2005 5:13 PM

And what was it that OJ and Bryan were doing?

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 16, 2005 2:45 AM
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