4/8/2011
Dear sender,
I am out of office till 14th August. In urgent cases you can reach me on +420 xxx xxx xxx. For all support requests please contact X. Best regards, Y.
Dear sender, Thank you for your e-mail.
I am currently out of the office till 08.08. I will have no access to my e-mail account during this time.
Best regards, E.
Dear sender, I am not able to answer your e-mails today. In urgent cases, please contact John Dee. I’ll be back in office on 16th August.
K.
I out of the office on vacation and will return on Monday, 8 August.
T.K. may be contacted for urgent topics.
Dear sender, I’m on holiday till 22 Aug.
Dear Sender,
I am on vacation and cannot answer your electronic communication. I will return in the office on September 1st. I apologize for the inconvenience. For integration issues D.P. and J.P. are appointed as substitutes with power to act.
J
Dear sender, I’m on holiday till 22 Aug. If needed you can contact:
Best regards, G.
Hello, I am currently on holiday and will be back on Monday 9.8.2011.
From June until the end of August, these messages are the most likely response I receive after hitting the ‘Send’ button.
I changed jobs, departments, colleagues and have moved to different projects but one thing has remained the same: the automatic “out of office” replies and their frequency in the summer.
In a way, Czechs and Europeans take their jobs seriously and I could feel their sense of urgency when we were working together on projects. But regardless whether we had a mountain-load of work to do and their concern over meeting deadlines, nothing and no-one could stand in the way of Czechs and their vacations. This applies not only to the Czechs but also to all other Europeans I’ve worked with.
It took a while for me to adjust to this mentality.
My parents hardly took any vacation except for the free holiday trips organized and paid for by my father’s company. In retrospect, neither did my aunt who worked in a hospital, another aunt who worked in the tourism industry and definitely not the relatives who worked as laborers.
In those days, the economy was the main reason. If you constantly worried about making ends meet, luxury such as travel was the last thing on your mind.
But when finance is removed from the daily worry and they still don’t travel, we are looking at reason no. 2: habit or simply culture. Vietnamese don’t travel. While Europeans take time off to recharge their energy by running off to the countryside, engaging in adrenaline weekend trips or flying to exotic destinations, Vietnamese take time off to get together with family or tend errands they can’t do while working. First of all, my parents and my friends are descendants of people who didn’t have any perception of vacation or had a completely different concept of “time-off”. Being Vietnamese or Asians, they are trained to think and behave collectively. If kidneys come in pairs, Asians travel in crowd. If they don’t have anyone to travel with, they will stay home.
Maybe this is why I couldn’t get any of my relatives to visit me in the city flooded by millions of tourists every year.
I'm a motivation explorer, personality type hacker, behavioral investigator and storyteller. I help startup founders, entrepreneurs, and corporate managers to understand themselves, the people they manage and how to get the best of their people. Specialty is in psychological personality types and brain-based methods. When I don't do the above, I hop around planet Earth with TravelJo.com to learn the Art and Science of people from everywhere and to give you all the free travel and tips and advice in many cool destinations.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
