It's very unrealistic to expect a company to suspend normal operations because of the possibility, however likely, of a merger closing in a short time. With me

It's very unrealistic to expect a company to suspend normal operations because of the possibility, however likely, of a merger closing in a short time. With mergers, the deal is not done until it closes, and there are tons of things that can derail that or at least delay it. Imagine if Sparrow completely stopped doing business as usual, and the merger fell through. How much revenue might they have lost due to skipping a sale, etc? All the work necessarily involved in a merger is hard enough on a company, and it would be much worse if they flat out stopped running the company in the meantime.