Our 19th most-read article of 2023.
Originally published November 14, 2023.
Hi there!
Thank you for your message. I am currently in the office with email access. Due to the volume of distractions, I will not get any work done. Please expect a reply between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. when I am home from the office trying to squeeze an entire workday into a few uninterrupted evening hours.
Hello!
Because my employer overextended on corporate real estate, I am working a hybrid schedule. I am in the office today, technically able to respond to email, but unlikely to do so. The pressure to support the urban ecosystem is overwhelming, and if I do not spend seventeen dollars a day at Sweetgreen, the economy will collapse, and the concept of downtown will go the way of the dinosaurs.
Greetings!
I’m in the office again today and won’t be able to respond to your message. I am getting right with my god because the free mayonnaise-and-deli-meat sandwich my employer offered as an RTO incentive has been sitting on the counter at room temperature for two and a half hours.
Good afternoon.
I am in the office today, and I still have unlimited access to email. However, the past few years of exquisite solitude and laser focus have rewired my brain in such a way that a conversation between two colleagues occurring across the office sounds to me like a Pachinko parlor, and it makes every synapse in my cerebrum flood with whichever hormone is responsible for unbridled rage. I will respond to your message from my home office tomorrow on one of the two days a week my company’s RTO policy allows for productivity.
Hello.
Thank you for your message. I’m in the office today and won’t be responding to emails. I can see my colleague Bill’s toes in flip-flops, and my therapist is not answering my texts.
Salutations.
I am not on vacation but am currently in the office. Today is the day of the week this company has dedicated to in-person meetings so we can chase the high of serendipitous innovation that can happen only when you’re close enough to smell your colleagues. I will respond if I survive this meeting in which Bill is scrawling what looks like illegible hieroglyphs on a whiteboard. Two of us are sending Slack DMs about Bill’s body odor. Two other men have glitched and are stuck in an infinity loop, agreeing with one another on the merits of cryptocurrency. The intern appears to be busy, but a glance at her screen confirms she has iMessage open and is sexting her boyfriend. One person is quietly doing all the work for all of us, lamenting they could do this faster at home (it’s me). Thank you in advance for your patience.
Good morning afternoon.
I am in the office with email access. I would have responded to your urgent a.m. request sooner, but I was on the freeway for ninety-seven minutes, launching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in order to experience the magic of organic collaboration. And now it’s the afternoon. Usually, I would have heard an alert for your incoming query, but there’s something about traffic that makes me experience an arcane and ancient dread. At this point, I produce a guttural scream that’s so loud the cabin rattles. Please expect a reply when I have completed my post-commute meditation and feel spiritually well.
This is a polite email greeting.
Knock Knock. Who’s there? Not me. I’m at the office. Making the same Zoom calls to clients in different time zones I could have made from home. But I’m doing it in an empty three-thousand-square-foot room with exposed brick and ductwork.
To my brother or sister, bringing me news from the outside.
I am in the office and at my desk today from the hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and I will not be available to respond to emails during this time. Every task, up to and including writing this auto-reply, has become a Sisyphean nightmare. Whenever I am able to achieve any morsel of momentum, a colleague drops by to ask me if I’ve seen the Barbie movie, or tells me about their autoimmune disease, or complains about their wife’s driving skills, and my work boulder tumbles down the mountain, demolishing the last shreds of my ambition in its wake. It’s unclear if I will even finish this message in time to reach—oh wait, here’s Bill with vacation photos from Ireland…