In a recent wireless phone commercial, a twentyish office hire and some of his goober buddies use their nifty camera-equipped cell phones to communicate while he is at the office. In one scene, the friends send him a picture that makes him guffaw in the middle of a board meeting.

The errant behavior is meant to be humorous, and the wireless provider is reaching out to a market it expects will relate. The truth of the commercial, though, may provoke a knowing wince from people who actually give a hoot about productivity.

Technology, meant to facilitate efficiency, has revealed its dark side. Even as viruses threaten company security, a virtual bacterial epidemic of tech-enabled distractions is eating away at workers' focus, putting pressure on bandwidth and technological infrastructure, and sabotaging results. Some observers are concerned not just with what it does to companies but to what they say could emerge as the next vice crisis--even being a trigger for health issues.

Since the problem began being tracked in the late nineties, studies have shown that as much as 40 percent of productivity has been lost. Other alarming stats include a 2002 Nielsen/NetRatings survey showing that 60 percent of online purchases are made during working hours. A 2004 survey by Cerbian and SonicWaLL, Internet management and consulting firms, respectively, found that more than half of respondents spend at least ten percent of work time on non-work surfing, which the researchers said added up to nine days a year.

Other research by pollsters and survey organizations have found that perhaps 40 percent of workers surf for non-work-oriented sites; one survey found that eight percent of respondents admitted to surfing for five or more hours. If all of that doesn't leave a company feeling naked, think about this: more than 70 percent of pornography sites are visited from nine to five. The Cerbian/SonicWALL survey found that 75 percent of all people have visited a porn site during work.

"You have access to resources that can and should improve productivity immeasurably, but sometimes it becomes an absolute curse," says David Morrison, an Atlanta-based consultant who specializes in technology issues.

And, as Morrison points out, it's not just misuses that pose a problem. "You can communicate quicker with people but the temptation is to communicate with everyone about everything--even stuff you really don't need to talk about. Issues that should take five or ten minutes wind up consuming hours. How many joke lists are you on? How many chain letters do you get a day? You wind up fooling around reading stuff or doing research that isn't helping your productivity."

After it banned all internal e-mail, a British company, Phones4U, tallied up its cost savings--three hours a day per employee, or $1.6 million a month.

Tech Management: Hoisted by their own petards?
It's not just the self-inflicted wounds of ordinary or titillating distractions. Technology begets more technology, sometimes giving birth to its own productivity barriers.

The two hottest online issues today, for example, concern SPAM and cyber-security, both of which cost billions in prevention and cure. Most often, spammers, hackers, and ne'er-do-wells are to blame. But like SWAT teams who accidentally shoot hostages, companies looking to secure their environments have created, or become, unintended victims.

In April, a Japanese company, Trend Micro, released a faulty patch that shut down its customers' systems. The company took 370,000 calls in a single weekend from 652 affected businesses--a $2.8 million loss to Trend Micro just in support calls. In 2004, Microsoft issued a security upgrade called Service Pack 2, with a Windows firewall that secured networks by blocking malicious code and pop-ups.

Unfortunately, SP2, which installed itself automatically, also shut down ports used by other software, and workers were left gazing at computers that looked healthy enough but wouldn't retrieve e-mail or even pull up company home pages. Eventually, a third-party company, Atlanta-based Business Oriented Software Solutions (BOSS), was called in to address the glitches.

"I see technology changing on a daily basis," says Suri Anantharama, a project manager at BOSS, whose clients include Citibank and other large corporations. "At the same time, our depending on the technology is increasing by leaps and bounds, and sometimes it creates problems. A lot of time is spent analyzing how new technology will affect the [work] environment."

If spammers and hackers are the enemy combatants of productivity, the incidents with Trend Micro or Microsoft stories would count as friendly fire. And then there are the Trojan horses, such as attachments with video snippets, that are welcomed into the front gates of the corporate castle by employees.

Anantharama cites one medical facility that made a huge investment in getting its clinical systems online to give doctors quicker access to life-saving information. There were 900 users, but the system bogged down after some of them used it to download music and videos.

"It's killing personal productivity," says Anantharama, "but it's also killing the organization's technological resources."

Tech: The new tobacco?
Some observers say that "killing" may not be just a hyperbolic metaphor. They note other noxious aspects of technology-enabled waste, specifically its effect on the people who get distracted. Company results are hurt, they say, but the compulsive, addictive aspect of technology is harmful to users, too. They suggest a purported rise in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in adults can be traced to people spending inordinate amounts of time parked in front of monitors or handling devices such as cell phones and Blackberries. Some even see a link between technology and health crises.

"I was with a CEO of [a major hotel company] last week who had a cell phone and two Blackberries," says Kathleen Hall, a stress-management consultant and author of Alter Your Life: Overbooked? Overworked? Overwhelmed?. "He's 56 years-old. I asked him what kind of heart disease he had. His face turned white. He said, `How do you know?' I said, `You're totally out of yourself. You're controlled, the whole physiology of your body is in the hands of technology.'"

Hall sees a clear and dangerous trend. "People have almost become victimized by the technology," she says. "They're addicted to it. I have patients that when their cell phones and Blackberries buzz, their expressions change. They're responding to the stimulus of the bell, like Pavlov's dog. What they don't realize is that it takes away your personal power."

The difficulty is that technology has been the engine driving the Information Age, enabling progress, wealth, and indeed, productivity. It is indispensable, and therefore addressing the challenge is more complicated than other addictions, which, as addicts will attest, are not simple at all. Unlike harmful products that can be eliminated, technology is literally in our faces almost--shall we say virtually?--all the time.

In a generation that has been preached to about the vices of smoking, drugs, and drinking, technology may emerge as the next vice. With surveys showing that younger people are by far more susceptible, this one may just be getting started.

Todd Pitock has waged a years-long war with his lower self, who is inclined to check e-mail and find other mindless ways to vaporize time that might otherwise be spent productively.