This is a story about a woman who wrote, in a single afternoon in 2022, what has turned out to be the most widely read piece of writing of her professional life, what that piece of writing was, and what she has done with the strange knowledge that the best thing she has ever produced took her forty minutes and was not meant to be seen.
The woman — I will call her Beatrice, because that is what she chose, and because when I asked why, she said, “It sounded like a name for a person who has come to terms with things, which I have not, but I would like to” — is thirty-nine. She works in strategic communications for a large hospital system in Chicago. She has worked there for eleven years. She has written, in the course of those eleven years, more than two hundred board memos, forty-seven internal strategy documents, six speeches for various hospital administrators, and one op-ed that ran in a regional trade publication in 2019.
None of these has been the most widely read piece of writing she has ever produced.
The most widely read piece of writing Beatrice has ever produced is her out-of-office email reply.
The afternoon it was written
The reply was written on a Tuesday afternoon in late June of 2022. Beatrice was preparing for what was, at the time, the first two-week vacation she had taken since starting her job. She was going to Portugal. She had, in her own words, “not been meaningfully off for so long that I had forgotten what off felt like.”
She sat down, at approximately 3 p.m. on that Tuesday, to write her out-of-office reply. She has told me that she meant to write it in five minutes. She has told me that she spent forty.
She has told me she does not fully remember writing it.
She has told me what she does remember is that she was tired, and that she felt, in some way she could not quite articulate, that it mattered — that the reply should say what she actually meant, because it was going to be, for two weeks, the version of her that answered emails.
She wrote it. She saved it. She activated it. She left for the airport.
The reply
I will not reproduce the full text here, because Beatrice has asked me not to. She has told me she is not yet sure whether she wants the reply itself to be published in an article, versus described. She has, she said, “spent enough time in the culture around this reply. I would like to keep the actual words out of one more place.”
I will describe it.
The reply was five paragraphs long. It began the way every out-of-office reply begins — thank you for your email, I am out of the office, I will return on such-and-such a date. But it did not, as most out-of-office replies do, end there.
It went on. It explained, in a tone Beatrice has described to me as “somewhere between a letter to a friend and the disclaimer on a prescription drug,” what she was actually going to be doing during her two weeks off. Not in the specifics — not the names of the towns in Portugal — but in the register. She was going to eat things slowly. She was going to read a book she had bought in 2019 and never opened. She was going to try, she wrote, “to remember what it feels like to have thoughts that are not in service of anything.”
It went on. It acknowledged that this was more than most people needed to know from an out-of-office reply. It suggested, gently, that the reader consider whether they, too, might benefit from taking their next vacation seriously. It named, without naming, the specific way that modern white-collar work erodes the parts of a person that are not for sale.
It closed with what she has told me was the sentence she is most surprised by, three years later. It said, roughly — and I am paraphrasing, because Beatrice has asked me to — that she would be back in two weeks, and that she hoped, when she returned, to be slightly more of the person she had been before she left.
She activated the reply. She went to Portugal.
She had not expected anyone to notice.
The first screenshot
The first screenshot appeared on Twitter approximately six days after she left.
Beatrice has told me she found out about it because a friend of hers, who was following the person who posted it, texted her a screenshot of the screenshot. The screenshot had, at that point, been retweeted approximately eight hundred times. It included, in the accompanying caption, three words the friend had chosen: “This is real.”
The post’s caption itself read: “someone at a hospital in chicago has been thinking about the meaning of vacation.”
Beatrice, in Portugal, in a small rented apartment in the Alfama neighborhood of Lisbon, sat on a small wrought-iron balcony and read the screenshot on her phone. She read it three times. She then, she has told me, put her phone in a drawer and did not open it for the rest of the trip.
Which was, she said, ultimately good.
She came back to eleven hundred emails.
She came back to sixteen thousand retweets.
The three years since
I will summarize.
The out-of-office reply has, in the three years since Beatrice’s vacation, been screenshotted approximately fifteen thousand times. It has been shared on LinkedIn by a former Cabinet secretary. It has been read aloud, in full, at the wedding of a woman Beatrice has never met — the officiant read it, at the bride’s request, as a “reflection on modern living.” It has been framed. It has been laminated. It has been included in a book of “workplace ephemera” published by a small press in 2024. Beatrice was not asked for permission. She has not, she has told me, asked to be paid.
It has also, more strangely, produced professional consequences.
Beatrice has been invited to speak at four conferences about the reply. She has accepted two of the invitations. She has been asked to write a book about “the philosophy of the out-of-office” by an editor at a large publishing house. She has declined, twice. She has been contacted by three separate consultancies who wanted to hire her to write “authentic voice” corporate communications for their clients. She has declined all three.
She has been offered a raise at her own job.
She has not, she has told me, been given specific credit for the reply at her own job. She thinks this is because her employer, a large hospital system, is not entirely sure how to feel about the fact that its senior communications professional has become internet-famous for the emotional register of her vacation announcement.
She has, she has told me, been asked twice by her own boss whether she has considered “toning down” any future out-of-office replies.
She has, she has told me, twice said that she has considered it, and has decided against it.
The question that has bothered her
The thing about the reply that has bothered Beatrice, in the three years since she wrote it, is not the fame. She has, she has told me, made peace with the fame. She is not on Twitter. She has never read the comments on any of the fifteen thousand screenshots. She has kept her private life private. She has, in some meaningful sense, allowed the reply to have its own separate existence, floating around the internet, without letting it colonize her own.
The thing that has bothered her is a much smaller and more specific thing.
The thing that has bothered her is this: the reply is, by any reasonable measure, the best piece of writing she has ever produced. It is more widely read than any of her board memos. It is more widely quoted than any of her strategy documents. It has, in one document written over forty minutes, communicated a set of ideas more clearly and more movingly than she has, she believes, ever communicated anything else.
And she did not mean to write it.
She had not, in any meaningful sense, been trying.
She had spent, before writing it, eleven years learning to write for her job. She had studied. She had drafted. She had rewritten. She had accepted edits from her superiors. She had, in the two hundred board memos and the forty-seven strategy documents and the six speeches, made herself into a good corporate writer.
None of that writing had ever, in her memory, produced the kind of response that the out-of-office reply produced.
She has spent three years trying to understand why.
What she has come to
Beatrice has, in our conversations, offered me several possible explanations. She has told me she does not think any of them are complete.
The first: that the out-of-office reply was written in a state she has not been able to reproduce. She was tired. She was already, mentally, half in Portugal. She was not writing to be judged. She was writing, in her own words, “to leave a small honest note on the door of my working life.” That honesty, she believes, was audible.
The second: that most modern work writing is bad. That it is bad because it is written by people who are, at all times, aware of being judged. That the out-of-office reply was, by virtue of not being real work, exempt from that judgment — and that being exempt from that judgment allowed it to be actually good.
The third: that she has, over the course of eleven years of corporate writing, accidentally trained herself to write worse. That the reply came out of some older version of her — the version that existed before she learned to write memos — and that this older version has been sitting, largely dormant, underneath the current version the whole time.
She has told me she suspects some combination of all three.
She has told me she is not sure the combination matters.
She has told me the more useful question is what to do with the information.
What she is doing
Beatrice has, in the past six months, begun a small private practice.
She writes, once a week, one document. She writes it in her own voice. She writes it in forty minutes or less. She writes it without the intention of showing it to anyone. She does not save it in her work drive. She keeps it in a folder on her personal laptop labeled, in her own idiosyncratic way, “OFFICE.”
She has, she has told me, forty-two documents in the folder.
She has not, she has told me, read any of them back.
She has told me that she is not sure whether the exercise is producing anything. She is not sure whether she is developing the skill again, or whether the exercise is just a way of proving to herself that the skill exists, or whether the skill was never a skill in the first place — whether it was, in fact, only ever a byproduct of not trying.
She has told me she is going to keep doing it.
She has told me she has, twice, considered writing a book — the book that the editor from the large publishing house asked her to write — but writing it about a different subject than the one that was proposed. Not about the philosophy of the out-of-office. About what she is calling, in her own head, “the writing you can only do when nobody is watching.”
She has not yet started the book.
She has not yet decided whether she will.
(For a related earlier piece about the writing people do that they cannot bring themselves to send, see the Wattalife story about the woman who has been drafting a resignation letter for six years and has not sent it.)
What this is
I have, in the months since I first heard this story, been thinking about how much of what we do at work is written not to communicate but to protect. To protect ourselves from criticism. To protect our jobs. To protect the small careful reputations we have built. It is difficult, when the primary function of your writing is protection, for that writing to also be good.
Beatrice’s out-of-office reply was not written to protect anything. It was written to leave a small honest note on the door of her working life. She wrote it, activated it, and left.
The reply is still out there. It is being screenshotted, right now, by someone somewhere. It is, in a small way, still doing what she meant it to do.
She herself is at her desk in Chicago, writing a board memo. She is trying to make it good. She is not, by her own account, succeeding.
She has, she has told me, four days of vacation coming up in July.
She is thinking about what she will write.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, revised her own out-of-office reply three times. She has not yet been on vacation. She is, however, prepared.