Away Messages

So, what's the chochma behind away messages? Are away messages intended to provide amusement for all those maniacal away-message-checkers out there? (You know who you are) Or are they merely meant to give information about a person's current whereabouts or contact information? I subscribe to the former. I have rarely, if ever, put my phone number or location in an away message, not because I don't want people to know where I am or how to reach me, but because even if people don't know where I am, they can still reach me in the same way they would if they knew exactly where I was. Just as an aside, why is it that people insist on knowing every minute detail of other people's lives? I don't mean that people are nosy. This is better left to an example. When I call someone on the phone, aside from maybe "How are you?" or "What's up?" the first question I ask him or her will inevitably be, "Where are you?" I really couldn't say why I need to know. It will have little or no impact on the remainder of the conversation. It could be that I really don't like talking on the phone and would prefer to speak in person, in which case I'd be asking for their whereabouts just on the off chance that they're in the neighborhood. But I don't think that's it. Whatever, who cares? Oh, for those of you who were paying attention I had a little SNAFU earlier with pronoun/antecedent agreement. I just don't feel like going back to fix it. That's just my little way of sticking it to the man. Power to the people.