Now That I am Back Home, Here is Your Standard Email Note
Posted on February 18, 2013 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
Hi there. I’ve been away from the Internets for about ten days, and as you might imagine quite a lot of e-mail has piled up in the interim. I’ll be going through it over the next couple of days, and mostly not responding to it, unless it’s something business related or otherwise needs an immediate response. So if you sent me an e-mail in the last ten days and were hoping for a response but don’t get one by 5pm Eastern on February 20th, you can send it again (but please please please don’t unless it’s really important). This note does not apply to people sending Big Idea queries — I batch you folks separately and will respond at a later date.
I will also be spending the next couple of days catching up with stuff, both online and in real life. I may also be catching up on sleep, because I think after nine days of avoiding all manner of bugs and viruses, I may have caught something today. So participation here may be spotty for a couple of days.
Also, yes, I will have a full report on my wanderings sometime fairly soon. Some of you by now may have figured out that I went on the JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 trip, possibly because of all the pictures of me from that cruise now flooding Twitter. Well, I will not deny it. Details coming soon(ish).
I’ve said for years that this is what every business email client really needs: an Out Of Office message which rejects the original emails and tells the sender, “John is out of the office for the next 10 days. If your email is truly important, please resend it 2 days after he returns.” I figure most senders will forget or the email will have been made obsolete by events, and you won’t have to spend 2 days of your life going thru crap email that wasn’t important to begin with and is even less so now.
After John said “nautically delicious”, I feel silly to have not thought of the JoCo Cruise. I suppose I imagined it was a Douglas Adams-like sequestration to finish a secret writing project.
Perhaps the government summoned SF writers to secret meetings at Boskone to consult about the aliens who are flinging rocks at us, and the twitter pics are part of a disinformation campaign to keep us from getting suspicious. Sure, I know it would have been easier if John had just said, “I’m going to Boskone a few days early”, but that’s exactly what they want us to think.
It’s probably better if you neither read nor respond to the (largely subliminal, but there) profanity ridden complaints about your, er, “use” of the Cubs in last week’s The Human Division episode.
Beej: My standard out-of-office reply is generally something along the lines of, “I’m out of the office until (date x). If this requires immediate attention, you obviously have an over-inflated sense of my importance.”
Glad you’re home safely.
I was joking when I suggested that surely you must have been on the Vomit Cruise, standing back-to-back with Krissy on top of a buffet table wearing pirate hats and wielding Chiascurria swords to defend the remaining bacon against ravening hordes of angry passengers.
…mostly because a friend of mine sent me a text that said “Hey, just saw Scalzi and Krissy” when the other ship was boarding.
Nerds: ruining perfectly good jokes since 1968.
OK, fine. But where’s my standard cat photo?