When you send an email to someone on vacation, you often get a rather smug and self-satisfied autoresponse, usually something like: “I am on vacation for the next two weeks and unable to respond to emails. If this is an emergency, please contact my assistant.”
What they’re really saying is this: “Isn’t it sad that you’re still working while I’m on vacation? Aren’t you now just totally depressed? Admit it: You’re jealous of my healthy work-life balance.”
Out-of-the-office messages such as that are infuriating because we all know people with that outgoing message are, in fact, getting their emails. Anyone organized enough to compose and activate that kind of autoresponse message is a connectivity freak. That kind of person wouldn’t dream of missing a single message.
I spend part of my summer every year or two on an island floating off the eastern seaboard, surrounded by family but not surrounded by cellular phone coverage or internet access, and for the high-powered bankers and lawyers that swarm that island in the summer, this is a very bitter pill to swallow.
It’s a pretty comical sight. Wandering through a picturesque old whaling town, stressed-out and uptight business dudes in ridiculously fashionable “casual” clothes bark into what looks like midair — sometimes it’s hard to see the earbuds beneath the Loro Piana caps — contorting their heads into all sorts of shapes and positions, trying to capture the strongest signal.
“Can you hear me now? What about now? Can you hear me now? What about now?”
I’m certain every one of those poor things has an outgoing on-vacation notice on their email account, but that doesn’t stop them from returning every message.
They don’t want to be in the office. But they don’t want to be out of the office, either. So, they’ve chosen the next worst thing: They’re on a beautiful island, next to a postcard beach, but their faces are locked on to the flickering bars on their smartphones, reaping none of the benefits of a vacation — relaxation, renewal, time with friends and family, scenic beauty — and none of the benefits of a workplace, such as telephone service or web connectivity.
For the record, my iPhone buzzed only twice with work-related emails. Both of them, of course, were marked “URGENT.” My working screenwriter’s method of dealing with these kinds of messages is to ignore them. Most of the time, whatever it was that was so urgent is automatically downgraded during the day, so by the time I’m in a place with good cell coverage and in the mood to respond, about halfway through my afternoon Negroni, whatever it was has magically solved itself.
But one of the emails was genuinely urgent. My producing partners and I have been trying for weeks to get a project off the ground, and as luck would have it, we needed to talk to the studio that day, that minute, no delays allowed.
And so there I was, a man on vacation, in shorts and a bright white polo shirt, racing to the top of a sand dune for better reception.
I knew that was the place to run to because there were six or seven guys already up there, marching up and down and shouting and tapping out emails. In a few moments, I saw the bars on my iPhone line up, I placed the call, and I stood in the hot sun participating in that most uncivilized ritual of contemporary life, the conference call.
Down below, on the beach, was vacation. Up there on the dune was something else. Some of us talking softly into the middle distance, some tapping on keyboards, some just listening silently, and all of us hopping a little bit, barefoot on the scorching sand.
From a distance, I’m sure we looked like one of those irritating avant-garde dance troupes performing something called the “Anxiety Dance of the Middle-Aged Man.” The six or seven of us paced the dunes like lost souls, caught in the hot, sunny limbo between vacation and work, and failing, frankly, at both.
I’m not sure how the other guys fared, but my call was a bust. The project I’ve been working on for nearly a year was officially rejected by the new president of the television network. I had scrambled up to the top of the dune and angled my head toward a distant cell tower and interrupted a glorious beach day just to get some very bad and utterly nonurgent news.
I could now return to my summer holiday confident that absolutely no one would be trying to reach me and that no emails or messages would be urgent, which is not really an improvement. It’s much better, I’ve discovered, to be out of the office than it is to be out of a job.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and a co-founder of Ricochet.com.
