Out of... patience

You may have seen this little gem on the bbc website - apparently more of us are screening emails by putting our out of office notification up.
The bbc story

This doesn't work too well for me with one of my friends. As soon as she gets an 'out of office' she sends a barrage of emails asking me where I am, whether I'm really on holiday, and whether I got any of her previous emails.

It does remind me of many conversations we've had about the status of email in terms of authority and formality. We always used to rank communications in the order
speech - email - fax - letter
with speech being the least formal, and letter being the most. But I suspect that the advent of instant messaging is pushing email even nearer to speech.

(There's a lovely bit of research for someone there about how people change their language between writing emails and writing instant messages - and why, when emails are just as 'instant'.)