Helpdesk — One customer, one conversation

Somebody writes in twice. Somebody buries a second question in a reply. Both are ordinary, and both leave the queue saying something untrue about how much work is waiting. Merging moves the conversation, and nothing else. Pick the ticket to keep, and the other one’s messages move onto it, in order, interleaved by when things were actually said. The emptied ticket goes to the Trash — it keeps its number, its fields, its clock and its history, and it is one click to get back. Nothing on the surviving ticket is overwritten: not a field, not the owner, not the status, and not the deadline, for the same reason tightening a target does not reach backwards. We deliberately do not merge the two records. Two records have two sets of values, two histories and two numbers, and every rule you could write for folding those together — newest wins, non-empty wins — quietly throws away something somebody typed. So the thing that actually duplicates is the thing that moves.