How you can make out-of-office e-mails work for you

Tasha Cooper

English 1301: Cooper

The best out-of-office e-mail ever written

According to Piper Weiss, Shine Staff, in this particular column they talk about how when you go on vacation you have to write your out-of-office email message. It's always one of the last things on the to-do list. They found a vacation auto-reply of a guy named Josh Kopelman, that will now serve as their model for all future away messages—give or take a few key details. They call it a stroke of genius. Well they also talked about how this man is a psychological mastermind in creating such an e-mail. Lets take a look at it:

I am currently out of the office on vacation.
I know I’m supposed to say that I’ll have limited access to email and won’t be able to respond until I return — but that’s not true. My blackberry will be with me and I can respond if I need to. And I recognize that I’ll probably need to interrupt my vacation from time to time to deal with something urgent.
That said, I promised my wife that I am going to try to disconnect, get away and enjoy our vacation as much as possible. So, I’m going to experiment with something new. I’m going to leave the decision in your hands:

• If your email truly is urgent and you need a response while I’m on vacation, please resend it to interruptyourvacation@[redacted].com and I’ll try to respond to it promptly.
• If you think someone else at [the company] might be able to help you, feel free to email my assistant, and she’ll try to point you in the right direction.

· Otherwise, I’ll respond when I return…
Warm regards,
Josh

I think that an e-mail like this will probably make people think twice before sending him a message while on vacation. I couldn't agree more with the critics on this that if I had to ever write an out of town e-mail that I would probably use this as my guideline. I almost can't believe that this is a real e-mail but on the other hand I think that people are getting feed up with the working environment where even when you are on vacation it really doesn't feel like it. I think this may be the very first step to a revolution of people saying we are not robots we are people who sometimes need a break. I think this a perfect example of how disconnected we are with how people feel and how we don't think about the fact that others need a break even though we have a question that need to be answered, and with that I will have to say that maybe the guy is not a mastermind but maybe he is on to something bigger than we can imagine.