I understand some of my stakeholders have more stressful roles than others, but I really wish they’d slow down and take a moment to process.

One of them recently forwarded me a customer inquiry about an order confirmation email because the customer gave the impression that they received the email in error. The customer’s message was “2018? What is this?” It was a confirmation for an old order. A really old order. From 2018. I guess my stakeholder thought an old confirmation email was resent, but my stakeholder just had to look at the original message section of the email, which stated the email was sent in 2018. Y’all, that email was sent years before I starting working for them.

I told stakeholder that I don’t know what this customer is looking for from us. IMO since this is for an order from FOUR YEARS AGO, I don’t think we should put any more time into investigating it.

Even my Product Manager agreed that our stakeholders need to do more diligence on their end (like asking the customer why they are following up on a four year old order) before coming to Engineering and taking up our time.