Though the impetus for this column came solely from college basketball, the timing couldn't be better, given that this is our Technology and Social Media Special Report.

I myself don't follow March Madness, or any college basketball for that matter, but it seems many of your employees and co-workers do.

A recent study concluded that during the FIRST WEEK of college basketball's annual tournament, companies lose an estimated $1.8 billion due to absenteeism and lost productivity from employees streaming games online during work hours and following their brackets and pools.

That is a staggering number to comprehend, but given the explosion of social media, as well as the multiple platforms with which employees can access said media (think desktop, laptop, iPhone, iPad, Android, the list goes on), it really shouldn't be that surprising. Add to that the fact that the NCAA tournament is only one piece of the pie of lost productivity.

Factor in the employees who are updating statuses on Facebook, chatting on MySpace, surfing the Web, watching movies on Hulu, buying and selling on eBay, wheeling and dealing on Craigslist, shopping for dates on eHarmony, downloading their favorite music on iTunes and catching up on their reading by purchasing a new e-book on Amazon, and it is a wonder any work gets done anymore.

It might be easy to say that this is just the price employers pay for technology. There are so many benefits to a company, this is merely one of the drawbacks. I disagree.

My wife and I often have this discussion when we are in line at any type of convenience store. Be it a drugstore, gas station, convenience store - it doesn't really matter. Invariably, as I reach the counter after enduring a lengthy wait because, in this hideous economy, there is only one cashier working, I encounter an additional delay. The (usually, but not always) young person "working" the register is in the middle of reading or sending a text message. Worse yet, if they have begun to process my transaction and their ever-present phone buzzes, they literally stop what they are doing, pick up the phone and begin pecking away.

No matter how often this occurs, I am amazed each and every time. Though this officially vaults me into the category of oldies who talk about what it was like when they were kids, I took my first job when I was 13 washing dishes and bussing tables in a greek restaurant in Dover, N.H., For the princely sum of $3.35 an hour, I worked from the moment I arrived until the moment I left. To this day, in fact, there are few jobs I have ever had where I worked as hard as I did at the Spartan Restaurant. I would walk from school to the restaurant, work until 8:30 or 9 at night and walk home. Of course, we didn't have cell phones back then (OK, now I am REALLY sounding old), but trust me when I say this: If we did, and my boss ever caught me texting, I would have been out on the street faster than you can say OMG!

To illustrate my point, I still remember my first day on the job. About halfway through my shift, the other cook who was training me slid a plate across the stainless steel table that divided the cook line from the dish pit. "Dinner," he announced. It was the special of the day. I would later learn dinner was ALWAYS the special of the day, which was usually something consisting of food that needed to be used up before it spoiled, or else it was pasta, which cost about as much as a plate of sand.

However, I digress.

Lacking further direction such as how long my break was, I took my plate and walked through the double doors into the dining room. Being a weeknight, it was slow and I slid into a small booth in the corner and quickly ate my meal. Or, I should say, I started to eat my meal. About five bites into my goulash, the owner caught my eye and motioned me to the front counter. Though his exact words escape me 25 years later, the message was crystal clear: Take breaks on your own time. When you are working for me, you will keep your food in the back and eat between cycles of the dish machine.

And so it was that I learned a valuable, on-the-job lesson: The guy signing the checks wants his money's worth.

That job ended a few months later when there was a fire in the hotel above the restaurant and it closed down. The lesson however, stayed with me to this day. It's why I hate the excuse that "everybody texts" or "that's just the way the younger generation is." Rubbish. The owner of the Wilson Farms store is paying his employee the same way my boss paid me, and he has a right to expect you to conduct your business on your own time. It is an issue that is only amplified when the employee is neglecting the customer in favor of surfing the Web on his phone or texting the people he spent all day in school with. After all, when I was eating my dinner, dishes were backing up. Not a big deal. But when I have a dozen places I can stop for my milk and bread after work, customer service can make a tangible difference in the bottom line for the owners of these small businesses ... or does it?

The truth is, I could drive from store to store, determined to spend my money at the place where the customer comes ahead of the personal technology and my kids might well starve before I found a clerk wiling to sell me some food before they send their next text.

Matt Chandler: mchandler@bizjournals.com