Manager OTG's Out-of-Office Reply, Annotated

What follows is the verbatim text of an Out-of-Office auto-reply received this Monday at 9:14 AM, after sending Manager OTG a question that needed answering by Wednesday. The annotations are mine.

Hi there!

The exclamation point is doing real work here. We have not yet received any information. We have received only the assertion that someone — somewhere — is glad we wrote in.

Thanks so much for your email. I'm currently out of the office and offline through Friday, May 30 (with limited connectivity).

Three things in one sentence. He is out. He is offline. He has limited connectivity. Each clause weakens the previous one. By the third, we understand: he has a phone. He's looking at it right now. He may, in fact, be looking at this email right now. He has chosen not to respond to it directly. He has chosen, instead, to respond to it generally — through the auto-reply that was already going to fire.

The em dash inside the parenthetical is what I want to dwell on. It implies he wrote this himself. He did. He spent twelve minutes on Sunday night picking the right phrasing for "limited connectivity." His wife asked what he was doing. He said "work." He was writing an autoresponder.

I'm taking some intentional time away to recharge and be fully present with my family.

"Intentional time away." A vacation has been upgraded to a leadership posture. He's not on vacation. He's investing in himself. By "recharging," he means he is at a Hilton in Asheville. He is on a hike that lasts forty-six minutes. He is back at the Hilton.

"Fully present with my family" means he checks Slack on the toilet.

For anything truly urgent, please reach out to Greg (greg.tinsley@lumenwave.io), who is graciously covering for me this week. 🙏

"Truly urgent." A trapdoor. He has built a definitional escape hatch. If you reach out to Greg, you are by definition handling something "truly" urgent — which means, in 1:1 next Tuesday, Manager OTG will say "I appreciate you keeping that contained" while making clear, in tone, that you should not have done that.

Greg has not been told he is covering for Manager OTG. Greg learns this on Tuesday at 2:14 PM, when seventeen tickets arrive in his inbox in a 41-minute span. Greg considers, for the first time in four years, his options. Then he opens Slack and writes "happy to help!" with the same 🙏 emoji.

I'll respond to all emails in the order they were received upon my return. Appreciate your patience as I reset.

He will not respond in the order received. He will, on Saturday afternoon (Sunday at the latest), open his inbox, scroll past 280 messages, and respond to exactly four — the ones from his own manager and the one from a recruiter at Crestmark. Yours will be marked unread. It will remain marked unread for nineteen days. On day twenty he will mark it read without responding.

"Appreciate your patience as I reset." A sentence that asks you for emotional labor. The reset belongs to him. The patience belongs to you. The work, while he is recharging, also belongs to you.

In the meantime, here's a photo of where I am! 🌅

The photo is attached to the auto-reply. It is a sunset. The sunset is not in Asheville. The sunset is from a vacation he took in October 2023, and he has been recycling it across every OOO since. The geometry of the porch railing in the foreground is the same in his LinkedIn post from that same trip, where he wrote about "the importance of stepping back to see the bigger picture." 81 likes.

Nobody has ever called him on this. The photo is good. The sun is doing its job. Manager OTG is, in this image, present — both literally and metaphorically — in a way he has never managed to be in any actual meeting.

Stay curious —

Mark

"Stay curious." A directive issued to your inbox in his absence. A homework assignment for the people he has chosen not to email back. The em dash at the end implies more was coming and was, in the end, withheld — like the response you needed by Wednesday.

His name is Mark. It is always Mark, or a variant of Mark. Mark, Marc, Marco, Markus. There are exceptions. They are statistically insignificant.

I sent a follow-up at 11:47 PM that night. The auto-reply fired again. The 🌅 was, somehow, more orange this time.