This is an auto-generated email
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Office anthropology™
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Is there anything grimmer, in a high-modern working life strewn with grimnities, than the autogenerated email reply? It is so disempowering, so passive-aggressive, so ignorant of every basic principle of a life well-lived, full of rich professional experience — a life to which our dark overlords pledge public, undying commitment — that you would think no thoughtful modern business administrator would dream of using it.
But modern business administrators are thoughtful in the way modern yachts are dairy-free.
If we take it as a given that the optimal outcome to a newly-implemented process is 100% compliance without hesitation, repetition or deviation, let alone (God forbid!) complaint, then it is no more than sensible product design to ensure your loud-hailer can go everywhere yet come from nowhere and, once supplicants have clocked its clangorous tone — in the comprehensively auditable ecosystem of a Microsoft Exchange server, they can hardly miss it, even if they do actually, you know, miss it — they have no choice but to bend their weary footsteps to its urgings, however preposterous the outcome of that action might be.
Even less edifying is the auto-generated email that does not just warn you about something, or chide you for something, but actively gives you work to do.
Thus, your RAG status is green across the board; compliance is assured, and internal audit must look ex machina for the fault in our stars and finds it, instead, in our mortal human hearts.