[somethingsright]

Because I am available for certain questions. I am available for "quick" questions which only I would know the answer to, and for critical questions. I want to defer "easy" questions which the questioner can easily find the answer to, but is lazy or incompetent. In my role, I will get questions from downright simple "how do I reset my password", or was a certain move-to-production done; to some really critical ones, or, where others move on my go-ahead. The move-to-production query means different things based on who is asking. One person asks only because a end-user or their manager wants to know the status. Another person is asking that as a start of "we are seeing something strange in production" on a related functionality. So, I ignore the first person when actually busy, and attend to the second person right away always.

Also, there are people change the status to 'busy' when they are not actually available, extended lunches and what-not. And there are more people who forget to reset their status to 'available'. So setting status to 'busy' is no guarantee that you will not get a ping. Or a phone-call.

[notatoad]

I still don't understand why you'd prefer a "hello" message in that context. If you're able to take quick questions but are working on something else, isn't it better to get the question in the initial message so you can decide if it's quick or deferable with minimal back and forth?