Subject: the reply

There once was a boy who was extremely naughty. He never did the things he was supposed to. He was instructed by his peers to make his communications brief and useful, not Byzantine and vexing. He was instructed by his elders to use bullet points, yet he continued to write complete sentences which illuminated, rather than oversimplified important issues. He was told to be in his chair so that he might be helpful to the townspeople. Instead he bought a dive knife and ran away to a far off land to wear a wet suit and chase whale sharks.

In that far off land he had dim memories of strange beasts... Unix, DeskAvailability, CGI, PhoneShifts, EmailReviews, and something his gut told him was to be feared -- Customers. He happily forgot these dark visions amidst fresh fish and Vietnamese whiskey with his feet in white sands and blue water.

One day he was wading in the surf with a gig trying to get a nice little tang or goatfish for lunch. He saw something shiny crowning in a swell far from shore. He stared but it disappeared. Not knowing why, he threw the gig down on the beach, grabbed his fins and pulled them on along with his mask and snorkel. He splashed into the surf and cut a path in the direction the flash had caught his attention.

A hundred yards from shore he realized there was a large sand shark that was circling below him. He remained still, hoping the lack of splashing would let the animal's attention shift elsewhere. It continued to circle. The boy had left his dive knife on the beach with his gig. He kept himself pointed toward the shark so it could not surprise him.

The shark made a quick turn. The boy had to take a couple of fast strokes to keep above it. It bumped him with its nose. The boy hit the shark on the gills. The shark didn't like that at all and swam away quickly.

All the quick swimming and excitement had distracted the boy so that he didn't notice he was in a rip tide and being taken quickly away from shore. He was frightened but forced himself to stay calm. He pulled the mask down around his neck so he could swim freestyle more comfortably and cut a strong stroke not against the tide, but perpendicular to it. He knew it would be impossible to fight it directly.

After his leg and shoulder muscles were burning and he could barely continue because he was breathing so hard he realized he was free of the tide. He turned his course more directly to the island though he would land far from the beach he had started from. As he took a couple of strong kicks to get himself over the swells he saw the thing in the water again. It flashed green. It wasn't far. He knew it was foolish but he swam out after it anyway.

He found it shortly. It was a green glass globe wrapped in netting with some kind of paper inside it. It was somehow important, he was sure. He secured it to his trunks with some of the netting.

He was now so tired he could barely swim but it was swim or drown. He put the snorkel and mask back on so that he wouldn't take such smothering effort.

After another 15 minutes he was nearly back to shore. He saw he was passing over some rocks. The water was dark and silty from the rough tide. Shafts of light stabbed down like tarnished silver. He thought of the shark again. He passed over an immense brain coral. It was at 12 meters across. He forgot to be scared at that point while he watched the amazing undersea terrain glide beneath him.

When he passed the coral he saw glimmers rising toward him like a stack of shiny pipes. He knew they were barracuda. Several of them were huge and they were all swimming closer.

The boy swam faster, not caring if it excited the fish. Large barracuda can be dangerous and he had nothing to fight them with. He was in shallows already. The sandy bottom was dappled with sunlight filtered through the waves.

The barracuda were closer and one of the large ones lunged at him. He saw it coming and twisted so it didn't connect. He beat his fins back at it, trying to splash air into the water. He couldn't see much while doing that. He felt something impact his thigh. He knew, though it didn't feel like anything, that he'd been bitten by it, or the other.

He was so close to shore, he made a break for it. His blood was only likely to excite the fish or bring even worse ones in to see what was happening. He made it to the shore in just a few strokes but had no strength to stand.

He dragged himself higher on the beach as the surf washed up gently under him. He barely had the strength to crawl. He rolled under the shade of a tall rock and fell asleep in moments. The glass ball dragged up behind him on the sand.

When he woke, he saw the pit in his thigh the barracuda had made. He'd bled some and the sand was brown under his leg, but he'd stopped bleeding right after he'd fallen asleep. He thought only of the prize that almost cost him his life. The glass gall and its message.

There was a huge cork in the top of the ball. He could remove it, so ended up forcing it into the ball so he could access the paper within. He pulled it gently out. The paper had a company letterhead with a beautiful swash. It had monospaced printing in a style the boy knew to be native to the techno-valleys of the Western coast. His hands began to tremble. He read the words slowly, English had become strange to him in those two weeks on Thailand beaches.

The words read:

Do you want to make a custom vacation message? Remember to make it short and sweet. Our suggestion is:
I will be out of the office until <date>

Then he knew he had wronged his fellow cs-representatives again. He had gone on vacation until the 22nd of June and left a vacation message that was horrifying difficult to unravel.

He knew then what he had to do. He had to leave Thailand immediately to fly back to Seattle and revise his message before someone unfamiliar with "Alt d" was hurt with his disregard for the no-email iniative.

miss you,
ashley
--

ps: anyone who violates my personal code of what is acceptable email while i'm gone will be punished. that is to say, if i come back with a bunch of useless mail from you that shouldn't'a been sent, there's something called "the annoymeter delux" in your immediate future.

Explained

For anyone who doesn’t already know: on *nix systems you can leave a .vacation (or .vacation.msg) file which is sent as an auto-reply while you are, did you guess? on vacation. That is the dot-vacation file I left when I took two weeks off from Amazon.com to go to Thailand.