Wednesday, August 26, 2009

"Thank you for your e-mail, I am currently out of office"

Finally, the European summer vacation season is slowly grinding to a halt and the peons in head office are reluctantly returning to their desks and computers with as much motivation as me cleaning the toilet. This means that a number of projects and items that has been hanging in summer vacation limbo can now finally soon start moving again. On a personal level, I fully support the summer vacation system in Europe (ok, six weeks in a row might be overdoing it a little, but a month is reasonable!) but it does cause a lot of problems for subsidiaries in Japan who basically operate business as usual over the summer months.

I would here like to share with you some highlights of the “out of office replies” I did receive when trying to get some stuff moving this summer.

Mail 1: Sent to Mr. A at the end of July; receiving an out of office reply “I am on vacation until September the 7th with little access to e-mail, in my absence please contact Mr. B
Mail 2: Sent to Mr. B minutes after this, receiving an out of office reply “I am on vacation until August the 31st and will not be able to read my e-mail, in my absence please contact Mr. A

I can’t shake the feeling that they did this deliberately and were hoping to catch the mailer in some form of logic loop and avoid the issue…

Mail 3: Sent to Mr. C mid-August, receiving an out of office reply “I am out of the office until the end of August and will not be reading my e-mail, all e-mail received during my absence will be automatically deleted so please mail me again when I am back in the office

I wish I could pull shit like that...

5 comments:

ThePenguin said...

Them darn lazy Europeans...

So is the object in the photo representative of your company's products? Or just part of the uniform?

Martin said...

Don´t worry mr Salaryman. Japan will soon take over the world and enslave all lazy Europeans.

Anonymous said...

well i think japanese are more lazy than europeans. sleep half a day on the work and taking sport hours in a food time. europeans are maybe longer on vacation but they get this time by doing much more overtime.

Me said...

I agree with what Anonymous said...

My experience with Salarymen are that they are amazingly lazy. It is true that they spend the most time in the office, but they don't actally accomplish much.

Mr. Salaryman said...

Penguin - I'll buy you a beer if you can tell me what the tool in the picture is!

Anonymous and Me - Yeah, the laziness of different cultures is material for an upcoming post!

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