VISIT ICELAND taught horses to type emails on behalf of tourists wanting to ignore bosses
Tourist board Visit Iceland sought to ensure that vacationers wouldn’t be distracted by pesky emails from the boss back home while enjoying the splendors of “The Land of Fire and Ice.” So from the board emerged another board—one with QWERTY keys—upon which specially trained horses could type up response emails that read like they were created by hands rather than by hoofs. To arrange for a horse to write those boss-deflecting emails, tourists needed only to go to the Visit Iceland website and choose which of three available equines they wished to “out-horse” the task of crafting replies (from a short list of standard “corporatese” responses). Visit Iceland came up with this whinny-ing idea after conducting a survey that revealed at least a quarter of the country’s tourists have bosses who’ll send work-related emails and expect an answer back even though they know the recipient is on vacation.
