Why is Email So Complicated? Reason # 114: Dumb Robots, Complex Vacations

...Worst of all, in the history of stupid email robots, is the dreaded vacation loop. Two people go on vacation, and one of them sends out one last message to the other before leaving. Soon vacation messages are volleying back and forth as fast as the infrastructure will allow. One of them will return to a mailbox full of perhaps thousands of identical messages:

“I’ve run away to join a different circus.”

while the other’s mailbox will be full of a different message, repeated an equally absurd number of times:

“I will be out of the office for the next two weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as Margaret instead of Steve.”

However, long before either of them returns to work, a system administrator will have gotten involved to put a stop to the mail loop, most likely because it had filled up some system disks and brought a large bit of infrastructure to its knees...

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