How much idling is too much?

I am sitting in Aroma cafe right now on SoHo, go ahead say it as Husband would say "who has it tougher than me" to be sitting at a coffee shop in the middle of a work day. If you must know I am in-between appointments. So I paid for my coffee, first one of the day and it's already 11:30am, and they give me a log-in slip for the intra-web for 30 minutes. I felt like they are telling me 30 minutes and that's it. They said "no you can buy a cookie or something and get another 30 minutes".

This got me thinking, how much is too much idling? I know people who use Starbucks as their living room, entire afternoons, evenings, for interviews, dates. I was at another coffee place on Friday, I was doing research and using the web, and there was this woman there conducting interviews. Ever 70 minutes a new candidate showed up. It seemed to be for some tutoring programing. I was thinking by the 4th candidate, does this interviewer get a cut from the coffee shop? Each candidate came to the table with a cup of coffee, she was improving their daily sales.

I use coffee shops as my off-site office. I can work from home, which is what I do sometimes but it is very distracting. They are doing construction outside our apartment so there is a lot of drilling and jack hammering going on, which is difficult on phone conversations. Coffee shops or library's help me focus and do make me feel more professional and productive.

How long is the longest you've idled at a coffee shop?