Volume 16 (1984) of Advances in Applied Probability contains a paper entitled 'Singleserver queues with impatient customers', by Baccelli,, referred to' below as B. The authors of this paper were unaware of some research of a similar nature previously published in the literature, the most recent being 'Reneging phenomena in single channel queues', by R. E. Stanford, which appeared in Vol. 4 (May 1979) Probability and Its Applications, Vol. 10 (1965), pp. 515-522, by L. G. Afanas'eva (translated from Russian).The purpose of this note is to provide a bibliographical update on the subject of impatience in general queueing systems, and to outline some of the similarities and differences in the results from the existing papers on the subject. All of the papers mentioned here are concerned with GI/G/1 queues in which a customer drops out of the queue if his waiting time exceeds his patience time, which is a random variable.Many studies of reneging phenomena have been carried out for queueing systems with specific (eg. exponential) interarrival, service, or reneging distributions. The combined list of references from S, B, and Daley (1965) provide an extensive bibliography of this research. Investigations of the G1/G / 1 system with a general reneging distribution appear to have begun with a model proposed by Kovalenko (1961). Necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of a limiting distribution for the waiting time in a G1/G / 1 queue in which the customer's wait is bounded by a random variable are given in Afanas'eva (1965). Daley (1965) also gives conditions for the existence of the limiting waiting time distribution, and derives an integral equation for the distribution. The integral equation is solved for certain special cases previously examined in the literature.The two more recent papers Band S also contain sufficient conditions for a unique stationary distribution for the offered waiting time of arriving customers, and both contain new material concerning various characteristics of the GI/G/1 system with reneging. In some cases, the results from the two papers are identical except for notation. A partial list of the expressions in B which have a counterpart in S is given below, by description and expression number, followed by the corresponding relation number from S: definition of the offered waiting time-(2.1) in B, (7) in S; the limiting distribution of virtual waiting time-(3.6) in B, (20) in S; equations involving the probability of rejection (reneging)-(3.7) and (3.8) in B, (27) and (28) in S; a Pollaczek-Kintchine formula analog-remark #1 following (3.11) in B, (23) in S; a relationship between the limiting distribution for virtual and actual waiting time-(3.11) in B, equivalent to (21) in S; an integral equation for the distribution of waiting times-(2.3) in B, (43) in S. The approaches of Band S do differ in the manner of derivation of many of the results that they have in common. The most significant difference concerns the determination of sufficient conditions for a unique stationary dis...