No, not TBR. I was referring to the fact that you can +2 your own CL, which allows it to be merged. Officially this is an "emergency" feature, as you say, but a dirty secret is that it's used routinely. I encountered it in both Android and Chrome.

I've seen lots of self-+2s under the following circumstances:

1. You are the only engineer on your team, or all other engineers on your team are out for an extended period of time.

2. All other engineers have very different skillsets, and are not capable of doing effective review. Think Rails engineer attempting to review a touchpad firmware fix.

3. You have a hard deadline (e.g. product demo or factory build) and you're desperately trying to get as much working as you can. You may even be in a location where coordination is difficult and Internet access is poor.

For SWEs working on, say, web services, you probably have at least a medium-sized team (4+ engineers) and a week's slip is no big deal. But not all software is like that at Google.