On Wed, May 17, 2006 12:35 pm, Christopher X. Candreva said: > On Wed, 17 May 2006, Daniel T. Staal wrote: > >> These days, being out of the office, or town, or country, is no reason >> for you to not be able to get your email, if you felt you needed to. >> So, the only reason you aren't responding is that you don't want to. > > I would say the problem is people expecting e-mail to be treating like a > voice conversation with an immediate response. > > If you call the office and get a human, they can tell you Joe is on > vacation, someone else can help you. When people got voice mail boxes, > they would put those messages there. E-mail supplimented the phone, and > that same feature was expected.
Yeah, that's probably a better summation. I never considered email a successor to the phone: I think of it as a successor to snail mail. But I can see how some could think of it that way. As for work email while I'm on vacation (to answer another reply here): If you need to get a time-critial response to something about my job and you don't already *know* I'm on vacation, there should be a 'department' email address that you can send to, that anyone in the department can answer. (Since if I had a major project that I was handling with you I'd have told you I'm going to be out, and anything else anyone in the department should be able to handle.) It might not be your first thought, but it should be there. Or, pick up the phone. The person on the other end can ask you to email them details, if they are to complicated. But then you've fixed the time component. Daniel T. Staal --------------------------------------------------------------- This email copyright the author. Unless otherwise noted, you are expressly allowed to retransmit, quote, or otherwise use the contents for non-commercial purposes. This copyright will expire 5 years after the author's death, or in 30 years, whichever is longer, unless such a period is in excess of local copyright law. --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
