I just returned from my first vacation in three years and experienced an interesting message phenomenon.

For some reason, there’s a large contingent of folk who seemingly don’t trust the automatic out-of-the-office email response. No less than five people left me a voice mail message a few hours after sending an email and presumably receiving the automatic reply. Yet none of them mentioned the email or couched the call as a courteous follow-up. Why? Do they think the out-of-the-office reply is a mistake? That I’m avoiding email and not avoiding phone calls? Or that two forms of messaging will make them stand out from the crowd like a really good ad? There needs to be a study done on this.