This is an auto-generated email

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 principle of the richness of experience to which our dark overlords profess commitment, that you would think no thoughtful administrator would dream of using it.

Office anthropology™ Go Premium Resistance is useless. The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

But modern administrators are thoughtful in the way 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 only sensible product design to ensure the loud-hailer can everywhere, but come from nowhere, and its supplicants, having clocked its clangorous tone — in the comprehensively auditable ecosystem of an exchange server, they cannot avoid it — have no choice but to bend their weary footsteps to its urgings, however preposterous the outcome of that action might be.