Tags: microsoft

OUT-OF-OFFICE, OUT-OF-MY-MIND.

Composing an out-of-office message used to take 30 seconds and was usually written minutes before you headed to the airport on vacation. As a friend’s OOO noted: “I am offline until Sept. 29. Off the grid. No email. No phone. No texts.”

In a very few words, this sent a big, clear message.

Now, out-of-office emails have become Rorschach Tests for our relationship to our inbox, our friends and ourselves. True, fewer of us have an office to be out of anymore. But email, far from being dead, is gobbling up the world. We now send and receive 361 billion emails every day.

My first clue that emailing was becoming a platform for pearl-clutchers and virtue-signalers came last year when I read on the bottom of a friend’s email: “I am sending this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.”

Allons enfants de la Patrie.

Do you think Jews should pay twice what non-Jews pay to attend the University of Toronto? Or Blacks twice as much as whites to go to Western? Or women, twice as much as men to go to Queen’s? Non bien sûr que non!

But this month, Quebec announced it would double university tuition for students from outside the province. Double it at the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec, or Université Laval? Non. Fees are only doubling at English-speaking universities like McGill and Concordia.

Said Quebec’s Minister of Higher Education Pascale Déry: “Quebeckers will no longer pay for the training of English-speaking Canadian students, most of whom return to their province after graduation.”

Read on…

“I wasted time, and now time wastes me.”

Richard II said that, or at least his creator William Shakespeare did in 1595 when the word “doth” was used a lot before “waste”. I mention this for two reasons: the New Yorker cartoonist, George Booth, died this month at 96. As the magazine’s art director said: “if you can’t recognize a Booth cartoon, you need the magazine in Braille.”

But also because our under-rated Canadian seer, Dan Gardner, wrote about Booth’s passing on how we always misjudge time, and especially age, and most especially, other people’s age.

Booth’s cartoons were as quirky and charming as the man himself who was profiled in a 23-minute documentary on getting old and staying in the game.

Meanwhile…

An iPhone for the Arts

Last year, the tech giants made almost a trillion dollars in revenues. Put a different way: a thousand billion. It’s little wonder that governments starved

RamsayWrites

Subscribe to my Free Weekly Omnium-Gatherum Blog:

  • Every Saturday the Omnium-Gatherum blog is delivered straight to your InBox
  • Full archive
  • Posting comments and joining the community
  • First to hear about other Ramsay events and activities

Get posts directly to your inbox

Name(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Sign Up for Updates!

Get news from Ramsay Inc. in your inbox.

Name(Required)
Email Lists
Email Lists(Required)