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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I agree. When I suggested putting on a low-budget 50's monster movie on as background noise (e.g. Gamera, Godzilla, The Giant Claw, something that's amusing to look at for thirty seconds, laugh a bit, but not overly distracting), people act almost offended that I would waste company time like that. But if the TV has some form of ball on it, drop everything.

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I worked in a highrise office that had TVs ringing the floor that you could remote into to display dashboards and whatnot. One day I decided to play, on mute, endless episodes of How It's Made.

For reference, I work in a hardware engineering group. Some mesmerizing process would show up on screen, one person would stop and stare, and 5 minutes later we have a half dozen engineers who've stopped what they were doing to watch How It's Made.

Eventually we settled on Bob Ross as a happy medium in terms of "Pleasant Ambiance" and "Not Too Distracting."

the important people in the office both get to dictate what's allowed, and are in my experience more likely to be extroverted/sports-watchy types. Thus they exploit their position to watch sports with the other important people and who cares what the nerds think/want.

I think people are generally more tolerant of live events. I've been in offices where everyone's watching a political inauguration, or dramatic rescue, etc.

Last time (perhaps the previous football World Cup?) my manager simply said I could go home once the game started, as no-one else was going to do any work so that was fair.

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