...well in my case it really depends on what the meaning of 'urgent' is.

I did not know that the meaning of a word could be debated, after all I thought that the OED (that's oxford english dictionary for anyone who doesn't know the lingo) was the definitive source for word definitions for the English Language. Let's see what it says, shall we?

Urgent (adverb): Pressing, impelling; demanding or calling for prompt action; marked or characterized by urgency.

OK, now that we've cleared that up, my department had a meeting, about a month and a half ago to determine the escalation levels of our ticketing system. We determined that an 'enhancement' was something that people wanted, but we would get to it whenever we had the resources to get to it. The next step up was 'normal' which means essentially that your problem is in queue with the other problems that are of category normal and it is first-come first-serve. Finally we have 'urgent' which meant something to the effect "there is no other possible way to go about my job, please drop everything and help me".

OK then, so people, being who they are, started classifying things that aren't real urgent (in the grand scheme of things anyway) as urgent. After solving people's issues and giving them detailed directions on how to deal with their issue at hand, I kindly requested that they don't mark something as urgent if it is indeed not urgent! After all, we don't have that many employees to take care of issues in the 'drop everything and help everyone right now' kind of way. Well this person was annoyed that I asked them to not do this, and they talked to my boss who in turned talked to me - and this is the fun part: You see, it really depends on what the meaning of 'is' is...errr..sorry, I mean "what the meaning of 'urgent' is. Apparently, if something comes from the "Administration office" - it is urgent, no matter what. If they dropped an erased - go get it for them if they ask you to (even if it isn't your job). If they have no pencils and they crackberry you to get some - go get them, even though pencils are right next to them. I know, these are ridiculous examples, but this is what I was told!

And so we (not so merrily) debated the meaning of the word 'Urgent' for about five minutes at which point I lost interest in the conversation as it appeared that it was really a fruitless endeavor.

Looking at my boss's work queue, I noticed a number of open tickets from last July (July 06) - six moths ago that were marked urgent, but they weren't closed. My work queue was only 3 open tickets as I had resolved all previous issues. So, what is the meaning of Urgent? I prefer the OED definition, something that demands attention right now, and have it fixed immediately. I really do not want to be debating the meaning of words in the english language. I just want to call something the way it is - so if it is urgent, it's urgent. If it's not, then it's not - so don't call it urgent!