Use of IRC

Well it depends if it's part of your job. At my current place of work we have internal IRC
chat rooms for each project where it's not uncommon for someone to pop up and ask a question
about X and be pointed in the right direction. The use of trigger phrases and sounds mean you
don't actually have to read every line of dialog ever said.

Careful choice of IRC bots can also be useful. Once such hand crafted "multibot" provides a
great deal of useful script like functionality to all the engineers in the room at the same
time allowing idle observers to see stuff someone is looking at.