As someone whose job includes going through hundreds of out-of-office emails every month, I consider myself an inadvertent scholar of the medium. And what a strange medium it is: borne not from a need to communicate, but from a more meta-need to set the terms of communication. What shocks me, though, is just how little personality inserts itself into most out-of-office messages. Why is this? On Facebook and answering machines—even in the professional realms of LinkedIn and cover letters—we find ways of expressing ourselves, of sharing (and over-sharing), promoting and justifying. But the out-of-office message remains stubbornly formulaic, depersonalized. Have you encountered any interesting exceptions lately?
