@determined2300 (re post#5):
It’s both. However, in my opinion, it will likely not harm the OP, because most admissions personnel are decent people, who want to help kids, and who have considerable tolerance for such unnecessary and pesky annoyances. HOWEVER, that does not mean ALL admissions staffers, under ALL circumstances, will have such understanding and forbearance – therein is the risk.
To illustrate, have you ever been really annoyed and frustrated in heavy traffic, on a brutally hot afternoon, after a difficult day’s work, when some fool intentionally cuts you off to gain a five-second advantage, or jumps ahead of others by using the breakdown lane, or doesn’t alternately merge, and so forth? I suspect all of us have been, because it violates commonsense and common-civility AND because it’s plain selfish. That’s not too far removed from the OP’s potential situation.
For example, an admissions staffer receives and e-mail or a telephone call that expresses continued and ardent interest (duh, no kidding) and relates some not-evauation-significant accomplishment. However, this staffer has worked constant 80 hour weeks since mid-January, has a sick child at home, is tired and cranky, didn’t take a break for lunch, and thoroughly understands how absurd many of these “twenty-third hour” communications really are to admissions’s February/March core effort: evaluation leading to accepting, waitlisting, or denying applicants. Further, the staffer thinks: “What a jerk, so self-centered and so self-interested, he doesn’t even consider how busy we are, he squanders time we don’t have with utter nonsens just to have one more “contact” with X University. We don’t want thoughtless fools like him at X, and I’ll see to it he won’t matriculate here.”
Does this ever happen? Who knows. Could it occur? Certainly. Therefore, why take the risk when the potential gain is essentially nonexistent?