Preparing to go on holiday has always required a checklist — passport, swimming costume, that first volume of Karl Ove Knausgård you’ve been meaning to read because everyone says it’s amazing (spoiler: it is). But in the modern era there is another decision that could make or break your holiday: how will you set your email out-of-office reply?
Will you simply say, for example, that you are on “holiday” or will you announce grandly that you are on “annual leave” because a “holiday” is the alcohol-fuelled pursuit of erotic oblivion in Magaluf? More importantly, will you stick to what your out-of-office says? Do you plan to check your email while away or blithely ignore it all? Best, surely, just to commit it to the digital inferno.
The German carmaker Daimler is offering its employees a blissful solution. With the company’s “mail on holiday” inbox feature, correspondents will be told to contact someone else because all email sent to this person while they are on holiday will just be deleted. That’s right: destroyed. Gone. Imagine the calm of getting home. No horrifically bulging inbox. Nothing to “catch up” on.
A weaselly brutality is concealed within this notion of having to catch up on stuff after your holiday, as though office life were an engrossing television drama filled with sex and dragons. If you are obliged to catch up on what you’ve “missed” while on holiday, that implies you shouldn’t really have been on holiday. It is a reminder that time off is a gift of noblesse oblige in return for your servitude during the rest of the year.
The fear that catching up on a fortnight’s email will be epically disgusting labour convinces people to check their email while away. Some say they need to “keep in touch” with the office, as if it were a friend. (Such ersatz friendship usually operates in only one direction, like “loyalty” to a supermarket.)
Unfortunately, science seems to confirm what we already knew: that worrying about the office will ruin your holiday. The neuroscientist David Levitin recently declared the importance, in addition to naps and daydreaming, of taking “true vacations without work” for optimum mental functioning.
Our European cousins are at the forefront of more humane approaches to work communication. Earlier this year some French workers benefited from a new agreement obliging them to disconnect from work communication after office hours. But for something like Daimler’s brutal total-email-zapping holiday system to gain widespread acceptance is a problem a little like that of world communism: it has to happen all at once and everywhere. While there are still people who assiduously work on their supposed holiday, they’ll be making the refuseniks look bad, even if they’re not plotting to steal their jobs.
For everyone’s psychic comfort, it is crucial we avoid sending out mixed messages. I recently received an out-of-office reply from someone who said they were on holiday and not reading emails, but that if I were to email them and add the word “Urgent” in the subject line they would in fact read it and do something. Naturally, I instantly re-sent the same email, with “Urgent” bolted on, thus doubling the volume of email this poor person had received from me while on a supposedly relaxing trip. Of course, I felt sorry for the recipient. At the same time, the out-of-office message had literally asked for it.
Until we all have the inalienable right to the kind of holiday of which Madonna would approve (it would be so nice), what is needed is a go-slow solidarity movement. Let us all set our out-of-office wording to manage expectations violently downwards. A little poetic licence should be acceptable too. For instance: “I’m on holiday, on the moon. As you may be aware, there is no Wi-Fi or phone signal on the moon. See you when I get back!”
Workers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your two-week backlog of reply-all email chains.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
