When Professor Randy Pausch took a month off work for his honeymoon, his boss at Carnegie Mellon University insisted that he be reachable. So he recorded a message for when people tried to call. On it he explained that he’d waited until 39 to get married. Then he gave the names of his new in-laws and the town they lived in, so a caller could get their number from directory assistance. Then, lastly: “If you can convince my in-laws that your emergency merits interrupting their only daughter’s honeymoon, they have our number.”
I was thinking about this clever out-of-office notification as I tried to construct my own in email form. Prof Pausch’s honeymoon message is a story from a more technologically innocent age — it was about 15 years ago, which is at least 100 in internet years. Back then, aside from the hurdles put in place by determined honeymooners, there were also plausible reasons to be out of touch. Now, technology is so good that it’s ruined our favourite excuses for not being reachable. Writing that one has “limited” or “intermittent” access to email is usually no more than a declaration that one intends to be choosy about dealing with it.
But this is only half the story. The other is that technology, particularly when it comes to the out-of-office message, hasn’t kept up. There’s a robot that walks like a dog and cars drive themselves, so why don’t we have smarter ways to manage time spent away from work?