Quit playing Google Pac Man and get back to work, everyone!

As Chris posted this morning, many of us in the 25-40 year old bracket woke up this morning, fired up Google, hit “insert coin” and haven’t done much since.

In case you missed it, the Google Doodle this morning is of Pac-Man. Oh, cute, you might say. No- effing awesome. Not only is the Google Doodle of Pac-Man, there’s a game embedded in the logo that you can play and there’s even a Ms. Pac-Man 2 player version. You can go play Pac-Man lots of places on the internet, but there’s something really compelling about it being right there, by itself, as a surprise and not a lame embedded iGoogle window, right there on your Google. It’s sort of addictive. I’ve actually been “researching for my post” for the last hour and twenty minutes.

So of course, IT heads all over the country have started banninating Google. Well, it’s just one guy who emailed in to CNET to douchefully say he “had no choice but to delete Google” at his workplace, but from there we can extrapolate that on this gorgeous and sunny Friday, managers noticing a drop in productivity are not pleased with Google and are probably getting all on people’s asses for just trying to play five minutes of Pac-Man.

Here’s the email from Emir Shabashvili, a “computer manager” in Miami who ruined all his co-workers’ fun:

I am [a] computer manager here at Miami-Dade County. Today I [started] receiving calls from users. They were concerned with [the] unusual behavior of [the] Google home page–many of them have Google as [their] home page, along with the County page. [We’re used] to Google celebrating this and that and placing some pictures on the home page, but today it was the annoying sound of [Pac-Man]. Recreational games are banned by county regulations, so I had no choice but [to] delete Google as one of [the] home page tabs on users’ PCs. I wonder how many Google home pages disappeared today all over the globe?

We can probably also safely extrapolate that these are the same people who call personnel all concerned that the soda machine is dispensing free Fanta again. But if Google searches are any indication, though, bean counters and middle managers have their work cut out for them this morning. Searches for Tetris (or “play Tetris online”), Galaga, Frogger and ostensibly Dig Dug and Space Invaders are totally up by like a million percent this morning.