I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. Oh I've seen it, but I'd say it's very rare - I sometimes do pick up useful snippets of information

I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. Oh I've seen it, but I'd say it's very rare - I sometimes do pick up useful snippets of information (so-and-so is working on X) while grabbing from the refrigerator, etc. Like, 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time it's at best definitely tangential -- and sometimes outright nonsense (people talking at you for the sake of having someone to talk at) that grinds my gears and objectively disrupts my flow.