Laurie, I hate to be a pain in the ass and drag out a conversation that may be over with, but I guess I truly don’t understand what the big deal is. It’s not a struggle for me to say Happy Holidays… it’s more generic and covers New Year’s too, it’s an appropriate label for a greeting that is aimed more at “glad you get the day off” than “Happy Jesus’s Birthday,” etc. I mean, more “holidays” than usual are going on in the second half of December and early January, precipitating days off and people taking vacation if they are lucky, and it seems to me that it would be weird to pretend that we are getting the time off for no reason.

I’m in favor of PTO but only if one actually gets enough of it. I bet if holidays were rolled into PTO, the total number of days would miraculously shrink in most cases.

Thank you.

Also, people like to give names to holidays to feel important, although Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy (C)Hanukkah, Blessed Kwanzaa is getting a little tired. So…

Happy Anne Murray Holidays!

@everyone: Living in the world that is, rather than the one that should be, solves a lot of problems.

This is why I’m a converted believer in PTO and/or ROWE.

Jason, to be fair, you probably shouldn’t be SOL when I’m out of the office, because if I am at all good at my job, I’ve taken care of loose ends before I went on vacation and notified people who will be affected that I’m going to be gone, and addressed any concerns they have about it. I am fine with other people taking vacations, and I don’t feel guilty when I take one.

I suppose I put Happy Holidays not because I think it will actually affect anyone’s life, but just because it seems abrupt to end the OOO without some kind of closing. It’s two words more… I guess I don’t think it’s a big deal one way or the other. Plus, stupid or not, and I fully realize this is just me because I love this time of year, I do actually want whoever is reading the OOO to have a happy holiday season/new year/whatever. My hope is that they too are getting some time off at some point, or if not, that they are at least enjoying the season. I don’t consider it important to include or anything, but I don’t see anything wrong with it either. If I included the entire text of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” or something, then maybe that would be different.

Who the heck puts an out of office message up for half a day? I get a message from someone on my blog’s mailing list that they’ll be out from 3pm today until tomorrow.

DON’T DO THIS!!!

I don’t care if you say Merry Christmas, Happy (C)Hanukkah, Blessed Kwanzaa or whatever…

DO NOT PUT YOUR AUTO-RESPONDER ON FOR ONE DAY OUT OR LESS.

Forget the debate, drop the internal monologue, stop being nice. I don’t care, and that’s the point: this isn’t about being offensive, it’s about being useless.

When is the last time you ever