A possibly unbeatable record for the shortest amount of time between an email message and its resend

Raymond Chen

I occasionally bring up the issue of people who ask a question and then repeat the question, especially people who repeat the question with some impatience. At the time, the record for the shortest time between the message and its repeat was eight minutes. But I think I have something unbeatable.

From: X
To: ABC Team

I hit this crash in ABC. Can somebody take a look at it?

A half hour later, somebody replied:

From: A
To: X, ABC Team

This looks like the problem is really in the DEF component. You should have the DEF team look at it.

Person X waited a few hours, then got impatient.

From: X
To: DEF Team

Any update on the attached issue?

Notice that person X’s request for an update was the initial contact with the DEF team. One way of looking at this was that the time between the message and its resend was zero seconds. The only way to beat this, I guess, is to send the repeat message before sending the original.

But if you look at it another way, this is in fact unbeatable: Since there was no earlier message, the time between the message and its resend is actually NaN.

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