This made me realize, talking to people is like forcefully inserting you thoughts into their brain without their consent. People should just stop talking in general IMO.
- Hello
  
  Username absolutely does not check out.
- Maybe, but our heads don't need all that space to themselves. Room for 1.25
I also dislike the “hey how are you?”. I understand they want to be friendly, but it only adds another step in the conversational exchange.

“Hey how are you?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“All good”

“Cool”

“[the actual request]”
- I think it's fine, if done with the nohello approach:
  
  Hey , how are you/had a nice weekend? I could use some help with ticket #12345 as I need to do ... and don't know how to do ....
  
  But otherwise - yeah, you're now right at the end of my to do list.
  
  That's the way it should be done
- 56k noises
- Same here too, so I just cut to the chase as soon as I answer.
  
  "I'm doing fine, how can I help?"
A great one alongside https://dontasktoask.com/
People actually do this!?
- Yeah, I thinks it's partly a cultural thing. I've seen more indian colleagues do this than anyone else.
  
  It's definitely more common with my Indian colleagues.
- I’ve dealt with a few of those at work. Super annoying and just wastes everybody’s time.
- Oh, they do..
- My boss does this all the time. It's incredibly annoying.
- Hey, are you there?
  
  Hello
  
  That instantly triggers a delay till after the top of the hour for me.
"Hi, can I ask a question?"

No, don't ask to ask a question.
- Somebody message me something along those lines a few weeks ago.
  
  Them: Them can I as a question?
  
  Me: If you must
  
  Anyway, they complained to HR and they had a word with me. Stupid people. If you're going to be an international company and put your IT department in the UK, prepare for snark.
I prefer no meta.
Well, I usually take my time to reply. It's not my fault, when people then need to wait until they cut to the chase. That doesn't bother me. It's their problem.
- I have done this before.
  
  "Hi chunkystyles, good afternoon."
  
  Sometimes I'll wait for a few minutes to see if they follow up and then respond. Sometimes I just don't respond until they cut to the chase if it's not someone I talk to regularly.
  
  Minutes? It happens that I don't respond for hours or sometimes even days. (Depending on how close we are.) :D
There’s also https://onlyhello.net/

And https://yeshello.org/

And I think I recalled “hello considered harmful” and meta stuff like “considered harmful considered harmful”. Or were those on intranet?
When people at work have this as their status I just randomly say hello to them. When they get mad I tell them I just I wanted to say hi.
Life is easier if you don't get worked up about this sort of thing.
Damn, talk about antisocial and weird.

What if I just want to say hi to start a conversation, and I don't have some ulterior motive? Or perhaps I'm waiting to gauge the other person's mood or something else before asking them something?

What a weird, weird thing for this person to get a stick up their arse about. I'm sure they're really fun to talk to :-/
- It's a written message, not a conversation. State what you want clearly, don't force other prople to ask you what you want.
- Yeah but it's work isn't it. It's not bloody social setting.
  
  If you want to talk to me in a social way use the chat that is obviously for that purpose, you can tell because it's full of gifs of the Office and Barbe and the manager isn't in it.
  
  I probably won't respond straight away because it's on mute, I check it, but it's on mute.
Last week:

"Hi Neocamel, it's Tom from work."

~no follow-up message~

Me, 15 minutes later: "Hi!"

The end.
Um, hello? What's with no hello?

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