Reflections of a restless eccentric

Automatic replies have become an ordinary thing now. I was recently subject to one of these experiences, when I forgot to turn off network sharing for a position update on Linkedin. It got sent out to my 500+ connections, which I immediately regretted but sidelined as spilt milk. What I did not expect was the number of replies and comments I received. But this isn't the point. The point is that over 90 percent of those replies said the exact same thing. The first prompt that LinkedIn's auto-reply feature gave users. For people who haven't observed, most applications have started doing this of late. For instance, Gmail reads through your email, and if it poses a simple question, you get a set of standard responses that you can choose from. LinkedIn, similarly, gives you a few choices that you can instantly use to reply/congratulate/message people. While this is definitely an advancement on the technical front, the writer in me hated it. Maybe I'm being naive. But isn...