☕️ (R)emote Expresso #85

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

Somewhere in Milan there is a sign taped to a door right now that says CHIUSO PER FERIE.

Closed for holidays. That's it. No date. No "back Monday." No forwarding address.

Just: we are not here, and you'll know when we are.

In France they've gone further and sorted the entire population into two categories based on which month they leave. Juilletistes go in July. Aoûtiens go in August. People have opinions about this. Strong ones. It comes up at dinner.

In Japan, mid-August is Obon, when the spirits of the dead come home for a visit and roughly the whole country boards a train at the same time to go meet them. This year it's the 13th through the 16th, and Mountain Day on the 11th means a lot of folx just take the whole stretch. Small shops shut. The bullet trains sell out.

Except in Tokyo, where a good number of people do Obon in July instead.

And in Okinawa, where they follow the lunar calendar, so this year it's the 25th through the 27th.

Japan cannot even agree with Japan.

Meanwhile in Sydney it's eight degrees and dark by five. Nobody in Australia is on holiday. They did that in January, on a beach, in a paper crown, sweating through the pavlova.

In Mumbai it has been raining since June and will keep raining until September. Nobody scheduled a break around this. The leave that matters comes later, at Diwali, when going outside is a reasonable thing to want.

And here in the States, the federal legal guarantee for paid vacation is zero days.

Zero. We're the only wealthy country on the planet with nothing on the books. So "the dog days of August" means something completely different here. It means it's hot, school starts in three weeks, and you should probably answer that.

So picture a normal Tuesday on a normal global team.

You send one message. It lands on twelve people.

Four are at a lake. Three are having an ordinary Tuesday. Two are in winter. One is underwater. One answers at 11pm because their entire month is fine, actually.

And one has an auto-reply that says, in full: Back in September.

No name. No backup contact. No apology. No little joke to soften it.

That person is not being rude to you. That person lives somewhere that a month away is legally protected and socially unremarkable, and you are experiencing a labor right as a personality flaw.

Here's my favorite thing I found this week.

In 2014, Daimler rolled out a tool for its German employees called Mail on Holiday. You turn it on before you leave. Every email that arrives while you're gone gets DELETED. Not filed. Not flagged for later. Gone. The sender gets a polite note saying your message no longer exists, here's a colleague if it's urgent, or write again when I'm back.

About 100,000 people had it.

American friends, sit down for this next part. They deleted the emails. On purpose. As a benefit. Twelve years ago.

Now hold that next to this: roughly 55% of US workers don't use the time off they already have. About nine days each. Somewhere around 768 million days a year, unspent.

And the reason people give isn't money and isn't loyalty. Ask them and they say they're afraid of what's waiting when they get back.

Which is the exact problem Daimler solved. In 2014. With a delete key.

So August isn't one month. It's about nine different months happening at once, and every single person is convinced theirs is the normal one.

The Italian thinks you're insane for working.

You think the Italian is unreachable.

The Australian is cold and mildly annoyed that everyone keeps saying summer.

And you...

you're probably the one who didn't go anywhere. Who's still here. Watching the inbox get quieter and quieter and not knowing whether that's a gift or a warning.

Both, probably. It's usually both.

So that's everybody else's August.

Here's mine.

I'm Dutch and Irish, according to Ancestry.com and according to my skin, which has been screaming about it my entire life. Ten minutes of direct sun and I'm a warning label. I was not built for any temperature above 70 degrees. Never was. And now, with menopause showing up to supervise, I am at any given moment one degree away from a personal weather event.

So when August starts winding down, I get happy. Not relieved. HAPPY. It's the last of the really hot months and then the good part starts.

I lived in Houston for thirteen years and there were no seasons. None. Heat, then slightly less heat, then heat. Thirteen years of the calendar not meaning anything.

I've got ADHD, and I am only now putting together how much I needed the year to have edges on it. Something has to visibly change or the whole thing runs together into one long undifferentiated smear.

Autumn colors do something to me I can't fully explain. I don't just look at them. I feel them. I have favorite shades. I go looking for them.

And when a stand of trees happens to line up - the rust one next to the gold one next to the deep red one, all of them at once, all of them peaking together...

GASP.

That's it. That's the entire experience. A grown woman gasping at a cluster of trees.

But before the colors, there's the Fair.

Twelve days. The Great Minnesota Get-Together. Every food you can imagine on a stick and a genuinely troubling number you cannot. People watching. The 4H barns. Rides, music, shopping, exhibits. Every local TV and radio station broadcasting live from the grounds like it's a summit of world powers.

And Princess Kay of the Milky Way, whose head is carved out of a block of butter while she sits inside a refrigerated glass booth, turning slowly. Along with her entire court. All of their heads. In butter.

I would like everyone outside Minnesota to sit with that for a moment.

It's my favorite thing on the calendar. More than Christmas. More than Thanksgiving. Same fairgrounds my parents walked, which I find I think about more than I expected to.

I go several times. At least one of those times I go alone, on purpose, so I can walk wherever I want and eat a cream puff and cheese on a stick within four minutes of each other without one single person commenting on it.

So no. I didn't go anywhere in August either.

I'm just waiting for the good part.

Write the out of office you would send if you lived somewhere that let you.

Don't set it. Don't send it. Just write it, in a notes app, for you.

The rules: no apology. No "limited access." No promise to check periodically. No naming a backup so the reader knows they can still get at you sideways. Just where you're going, or that you're going, and the date you're back.

Look at it.

Notice what your hands wanted to add. Because they will want to add something. Some little softener, some hedge, some sorry for the delay pre-loaded three weeks in advance. That reflex is not politeness. It's what twenty years of no statutory anything installs in a person.

Then, the second half.

Put your good part on the calendar. The actual thing you're waiting for. Not a vacation, unless it is one. The Fair. The first cold morning. The one weekend the light goes gold. Your birthday, your kid's game, the tree cluster on the street you drive down.

Make it a real event with a real date, in the calendar where your work lives, in the middle of the workday.

You are allowed to schedule joy with the same tool you use to schedule a status update.

August is the only month where doing nothing is a legal right in one place and a performance review in another.

Same calendar. Same species. Wildly different rules about who's allowed to disappear.

You're not behind because the inbox went quiet. The inbox went quiet because half the planet is at a lake and the other half is under water and one guy in Sydney is cold.

The good part is on its way.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: If you send me one auto-reply that says back in September with no name and no backup contact and no apology, I will frame it.

That's not a joke. Forward it. I want to see the confidence.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.