No one ever admits to spending obscene amounts of time each day on personal e-mail and phone calls, especially in the confines of a Capitol Hill workplace, where hours can be long and managerial issues touchy.

But it happens.

In an age when modern technology, such as the BlackBerry, instant messaging, cell phones and pagers, makes it easy to tend to personal matters in the course of the workday, few aides deny they have done it, no matter what the office conduct manual says.

Many aides say personal e-mail and phone use does not prevent them from doing their jobs competently, considering the hours they put in. Their attention may be scattered in several directions, but so what? They get the job done.

But sometimes tending to personal matters on government time can become a problem.

“We talk about those things from time to time and remind people that this is Senate property,” said Mike Brumas, spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who dealt with a mini-scandal in the office last month when the senator’s scheduler, Stormie Janzen, posted sexy photographs of herself on a Web log. She agreed to shut down her blog and was not fired.

But has the office cracked down since the Janzen incident?

“I don’t police everyone,” Brumas said. “We tell people that they should use the Senate equipment to do their jobs. There can be consequences, so everyone knows that they should be using their computers, e-mail, etc. for office business.”

Everyone seems to know that, yes. But the reality is that most offices handle personal e-mail and phone use as they do dress codes — employees are trusted to behave appropriately.

In the office of freshman Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), press secretary Amos Snead said that when new interns arrive he sits them down and gives them the lay of the land. Among his warnings is one concerning personal e-mail use.

Snead directs their attention to a nasty e-mail exchange between two interns working for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) in the summer of 2003. The male intern was fired for sending a cruel e-mail to the female intern, his girlfriend.

The exchange — the content of which was a romance gone bad — spread across Capitol Hill like wildfire.

An administration aide and former press secretary to a GOP congressman said e-mail communication has grown risky in light of the Jack Abramoff scandal. He explained that the White House automatically archives all e-mails for five years so White House aides are “especially careful.”

He mentioned a scenario in which a male chief of staff on the Hill was flirting over IM with a low-level female staffer in the office and said the “discussions” were full of double-entendre comments: “Interestingly, he would say inappropriate things by instant message only, never in person, leaving one to conclude that he felt somehow more bold online.”

Many aides readily admit to a fair amount of personal e-mail and phone use.

“I couldn’t get through my workday without my Gmail or cell phone, but I always make sure to step out into the hallway when [making] a personal call,” a GOP aide said. “We’re a little cozy back here, and I don’t need my chief of staff hearing my conversations with my girlfriend or my after-work drinking plans.”

A GOP chief of staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he receives about 400 e-mails and 30 to 35 voicemails a day. “Last year I deleted over 37,000 e-mails, which is, on average, over 100 e-mails a day, and sent 12,500 e-mails, or about 34 a day. I get by far more [e-mails and calls] than my families do at their job,” he said.

As for spending work hours doing personal things, he said, “Of course, there are the idiots that spend all their time editing Wikipedia, but what workplace doesn’t have them?”

While tending to personal calls and e-mails is the norm in any workplace, the instant-message tool has increasingly cropped up on the Hill. In one Democratic office, Instant Messenger among co-workers has become so ingrained in the workday atmosphere that even one aide who partakes in it thinks it can get ridiculous.

There is “some debate about movies and TV, but mostly along the lines of ‘Did you see “American Idol” last night?’” the aide said.

IM is the preferred method of “complaining and gossiping” about co-workers. “In my experience, most occur after staff meetings, when I frequently get messages like “That was brutal” or “What was that all about?” or “Thank God the boss decided not to tour New Orleans the week after the storm,” the aide said.

Despite some of the more mundane topics, he sees some usefulness to IM: “It’s actually a very helpful tool, given the close proximity of co-workers, as well as when we need someone to ‘cover’ for us with a lobbyist or constituent we don’t want to see. And the best part of IM is the lack of a record. Once you close your IM, it’s gone forever.”

He said he often sees other aides in the hallways making personal calls on their cell phones. “Truth be told, I’ve done my last two condo mortgages that way, stepping away from the office to place calls to my bank.”

The aide reminisced about the pre-e-mail, pre-Internet days of working on the Hill. “I sometimes long for the days when I could sit quietly at my desk doing research without the temptation of IMs, e-mails and calls to my cell,” he said.

But long, quiet days are not what many modern staffers want, which is why humorous e-mails get passed around the Hill all week long.

A female GOP aide said her office does not regulate personal e-mail and phone use. “As staffers, we work irregular hours on the Hill and rarely take the standard one-hour lunch, and would be surprised if any member would not expect their staff to do some personal business,” she said, explaining that her office puts a big emphasis on family and that the staff has been told that family calls are acceptable.

“Making phone calls at work is awful, and I hate it,” she said. “Because we all sit so close together, e-mail is definitely preferred, so co-workers don’t hear about my annoying landlord, the hair appointment I need to make or what my post-work plans are.”

By day, she said, “I would venture to say if a staffer is using a BB at a hearing, they are probably bored and talking to friends.” She said many of these types of e-mails happen during “dead time” when staffers are waiting for things to happen.

One discovery that she and her friends on the Hill have made is “PIN-ing,” by which e-mails bypass the work servers and just go through the BlackBerrys.

Scott Parker, chief of staff and press secretary to Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), said he and the aides in Bishop’s office also use the PIN-to-PIN feature on their BlackBerrys when something is “time sensitive.” He said there are no hard-and-fast office rules regarding personal e-mail and phone use.

We have “just a general guidance to be judicious,” Parker said. “I try to review the phone bill, but no, I don’t think we’ve ever had a problem with it.”