Try, "Hey Bob, this is Alice, I work on the QA team in Dublin. I'm looking at an issue I think you might be able to help me with http://jira.yourcorp.org/browse/ORDERS-1234. Would you have a minute to discuss this?"
This is a cultural thing - some cultures value small talk as a requisite step in person to person interactions, including in business. Americans do have a reputation of wanting to get straight to business and of dispensing with small talk though.
Speaking from experience in France, one can call the same business and make the same request with small talk (polite) and without small talk (impolite) and get vastly different outcomes. If one jumps straight to "I would like to schedule a tour of the winery today", one is more likely to hit a no than if one went in with "Hello, how are you? I was wondering if it would be possible to schedule a tour of the winery today?"
This is perfectly fine and valid, and in fact is usually the format of my messages to others. It's entirely different from:
"Hello, how are you?"
...
...
...
"I'm fine; what's up?"
"Oh, I was wondering if it would be possible to schedule a tour of the winery today?"
Besides, not every culture uses phatic expressions all the time and somehow their civilizations don't collapse. It's a matter of taste, and I'm not a fan.
Reminds me of the "How To Talk Minnesotan" video. [0]
I'm a Midwestern transplant to SoCal and getting hit with "How's it going?" or the equivalent still gives me anxiety, 15 years later...
"Well, my Lumbago is acting up and I have this new cat who won't use the litter box. His name is Sammy because he looks kind of like Sammy Davis Jr. I'll post some pictures later. Of Sammy, not the litter box failure. Also I have this nephew I think is on pot. My sister is really worried but she's always worrying about stuff. It's probably because Mom seemed to like me better but that's hardly my fault."
After a round or two that people stop and think if they _really_ need to ask you anything at all, much less implicitly get in your personal business with a impertinent "How are you doing?".
Just begin the discussion.
I think a lot of people do this because they are bad/slow at typing and don't want to bother leveling up.
When I have to talk to someone whom I don't have an existing relationship with and maybe only have a tenuous recommendation to talk to them about an issue I think it's a reasonable place to start. They might actually not know about the thing I'm asking about and have a better idea of who to speak to.
Imagine somebody responded to that message with “Sure, what’s up?” Now imagine what you would write in response to that. Then just send that along with the original message.
So instead of:
> Hey Bob, this is Alice, I work on the QA team in Dublin. I'm looking at an issue I think you might be able to help me with http://jira.yourcorp.org/browse/ORDERS-1234. Would you have a minute to discuss this?
…you might write something like this:
> Hey Bob, this is Alice, I work on the QA team in Dublin. I'm looking at an issue I think you might be able to help me with http://jira.yourcorp.org/browse/ORDERS-1234. I’m following the steps, but I can’t reproduce the problem. I see it’s a couple of weeks old, is it possible this is fixed already? Can you still reproduce this?
In fact, normally a question like this is a sign something is wrong elsewhere anyway. Why isn’t the discussion about the issue taking place in the issue tracker? If anybody else has to pick this up, they will be missing all the info from the discussion that took place elsewhere.
Issue trackers are poor at back and forth discussion in my experience. Yes, you need to make sure that any important information or the conclusion of a separate discussion is recorded in the ticket but it would take all day to have a short conversation about an item, the whole time every person who'd ever looked at the ticket in the wrong tone of voice gets an email alert.
I’m so annoyed by the abuse of this phrase that I’ve taken to giving entirely inappropriate responses (based on context) when folks ask.
How was either this reply or yours actually helpful to the conversation?