What do I want for Christmas? To go back to out-of-office time, please

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/10/christmas-out-of-office-email-facebook-twitter

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Back when people still talked about screening their calls and thought of their email addresses as private, you could sometimes pretend to be out of touch for a week by telling people you were on holiday. In came a message and out went your vacation auto-reply and, even if you were within reach, it was understood you didn’t want to be bothered. This Christmas, millions of us will continue to observe this quaint ritual in the knowledge that not a single recipient of the out-of-office email assumes the sender won’t be checking her messages on Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, while the kids are opening their presents, in front of the Queen and in the evening, while she lies next to her partner.

Related: How to stop 24/7 email ruining your life

It takes a while for convention to catch up with behaviour and, although the auto-response message is redundant at this point, the language has at least altered over the years to account for waning credulity. It was short and to the point, designed merely to register absence and communicate a return date. Now that there is, short of death, no such thing as an undocumented absence, a person is “only occasionally checking my messages”, or has “intermittent access to email”: as if they wouldn’t cross the desert on their hands and knees to log on for two credit card statements, a notification from Amazon and a newsletter subscribed to in 2005.

Even if you take a week off and maintain a hard line about not replying to work email, there you are, on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting to the same constituency and actively cabling to your unanswered correspondents that you have, on balance, decided to ignore them.

I’m a little nostalgic for the days when an out-of-office email had such power and mystery that one could deploy it manually, 40 minutes after a message arrived, safe in the knowledge that the recipient would back off and assume the delay had something to do with “technology”.

Perhaps honesty is the way forward. “Along with everyone else, I will be communicating online as feverishly as ever this Christmas, but only with people I like.”

A win for offline shopping

I walked around another anachronism on Sunday, the last Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the chain bookstore might once have been regarded as an evil threat to indie publishing, and where it is now the pitiful last stand against Amazon.

The place was pretty empty but for a shouting man involved in an altercation with the manager, which is how Radio Shack went towards the end too. I was buying a Hanukah present for a three-year-old and what struck me, wandering around, was the pleasure of browsing in real life rather than online. I bought him three books I would either never have found or wouldn’t have taken a risk on had I seen them online, where we stick more narrowly to our tastes and proclivities. In the bookstore, with fewer choices, my field of vision was much wider, more serendipitous for that.

Overkill, actually

With the holiday season come gifts, parties and the annual festivity of reconsidering the film Love Actually, practically a cult hit at this point and most notable for featuring Liam Neeson in a role in which he is neither wrestling a wolf nor trying to recover a kidnapped relative. This week alone, I have read the following contributions to Love Actually criticism: “The Love Actually Storylines Ranked From Worst to Best”; “Reasons Juliet From Love Actually Is an Awful Person”; “Ranking All the Relationships in Love Actually”; “What Probably Happened to the Characters After Love Actually”; and “How Well Do You Remember Love Actually”? To which the answer is: too well. There is no escape.