The auto-reply

The most-read thing most people will write this month is their out-of-office.

Nothing else they produce gets the same treatment. The deck is skimmed. The email is read to the first question. The auto-reply is opened by everyone who writes to them, hundreds of times over three weeks, and read to the end, because the reader needs something from it.

Read a few. Nearly all of them are written for the sender.

They open with the dates, which is fine. Then they explain: annual leave, a well-earned break, limited access to email. Then they apologise for the delay. Then, somewhere near the bottom, if at all, the one thing the reader was looking for: who to ask instead, and whether anything will happen before the return date.

The reader came for the next step. What they got was a story about a beach, and a question that is now going to wait.

It is a small piece of copy, and it fails the way most copy fails. The writer was thinking about how they would come across. The reader was thinking about what to do now.

The version that works is three lines long. Away until this date. For this, ask this person. For anything else, it will wait until I am back. No apology, because nobody was wronged, and no adjective in front of the word break.

A borrowed minute is a borrowed minute even when the reader is a colleague. The good auto-replies say who to ask and when, and then they stop.