Elephant's back

One lazy Sunday evening my three year old niece and I were goofing around when she suddenly climbs on my back, stands and announces (with a tone you would think she may have scaled the Everest) loudly: "Look at me. I'm the Baahubali (pronounced in her cute accent) standing on the elephant!".

Like like!

I overheard a mom speaking with her teenage daughter and son at the driver's license office: ".....uncle Jack came like the other day and was like, can you drive me to the airport, I was like, I'm not sure and he was like, I can ask Ben and I was like, you can try that and then he like drove off. I was like not sure what to do and called your father and he was like, it is ok Ben should be able to help, and I was like it's ok.........".

I'm certainly not a good English speaker but it was a little funny to hear that conversation. I was trying to count how many likes she was using. It also reminded me of the school/college days where we used to count how many times a certain word was used by some teachers/professors repeatedly in their lectures.

I wonder if it's the "Like" on Facebook that influenced the word "like" being used as a filler word in the conversations these days.

What's your filler word or a word that you use repeatedly in your conversations? I think I use "weird" quite a bit to describe things. :)

Olymp(eth)ics

One a fine summer Monday, I went to office hoping to get a bunch of things crossed out on my list of things to do. I got through emails and started with a couple of things by the lunch time. I opened the lunch box on my desk (yeah, I don't take lunch breaks) and as I tried to chew a mouthful (when you're hungry, you tend to shove the food through) I suddenly remembered that the summer Olympics had just started over the weekend. I quickly searched for the online live link and started watching it with the window sized to a half of the second screen I use. I continued to do my work with constant distraction of watching the Olympic events. I sometimes even stopped my work completely to catch some important moments of the sports. I was not able to get things done as much as I was hoping to.

This happened on three or four days of the two weeks that the Olympics were held with different levels of distraction. A few days later, I started to wonder if what I did was unethical. I did not miss any deadlines nor my work was impacted too much by watching the sporting event during the work hours, but I have to admit it was certainly a distraction.

What do you think? Would watching news or even listening to music online at your work be wrong?