The irony is that ''working vacation'' came into the lingo with a wink and a nod. Now the ruse has become a reality. Fully equipped with the toys of e-mail, voice mail, cellphones, labor trumps leisure. It's the reason why 83 percent of vacationers, tethered by technology and anxiety and expectations, check in at the office.

83%??? Dang, should we believe that? Well maybe we should. I've been struggling to take a 'real' vacation all summer, but instead have had bits and pieces of leisure here and there in between other things. Which means, some days of not checking e-mail for awhile, either for relaxation or technical reasons... That seems perfectly reasonable to me, as I've never considered that people were expected to be tethered to their keyboards. However, my correspondents often react with dismay or apparent disbelief, continuing to mail me to ask me to respond to things even after I've explained I'll be offline. Why is that? We've discussed on Discordia in the past people's differing perceptions of the "presence" of other humans via e-mail. Cyberspace presence is a topic that I usually don't find all that interesting in the 'are we becoming post-human cyborgs?' context. I'm personally more interested in where our minds might be going than our bodies. Of course, those *are* somewhat interrelated. Raise your hand if you've got repetitive stress injury; woops - other hand...

Anyway, it seems that now that more people have "always on" internet connections, our minds are expected to be "always on" - or "always online" - too. Your thoughts? Is this all really a US-only phenomenon, or are the packets of human perpetualness pinging around in your country too?