Where were you when the empty balloon floated over Colorado? Last week’s drama-turned-alleged-hoax was no presidential assassination or shuttle disaster. But the clichéd question is still getting asked a lot lately. Where were you when Michael Jackson died, or during his funeral, or when the jet plane miraculously landed on New York’s Hudson River? Nowadays, the answer is often the same: at the office, watching it happen instead of doing any work.

Even before last week’s story about the boy in a runaway balloon was exposed as a possible scam, a question emerged. What happens to the economy when millions of workers simultaneously ignore their jobs and gather around the TV, surf for gossip about the weird family behind the stunt, or Twitter each twist and turn of the story? “The amount of work hours that are wasted by people playing around on computers is already mind-bogglingly astronomical,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of media studies at Syracuse University in New York. “When something like Balloon Boy or Michael Jackson’s death comes along, workers all waste their time on the same thing.” That collective procrastination can easily add up to vast sums at a time when the recession is already hammering companies. Continue…