It’s extremely common in the NY area, at least in the banking world.
Speculating on the growing popularity of this usage – I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that American working culture highly discourages the idea of ever being off the clock. So, people don’t actually want to say “I’ll be unavailable” in such stark terms. They use a metaphor like “out of pocket” just so they don’t have to say the literal words, because it feels like you’re not taking work seriously enough if you ever dare not to be available.
I’ve heard it used in exactly the sense the OP notes in both a US and a British movie within the past year (I want to say the US movie was The Office Christmas Party, and whatever the British movie was, it had Martin Freeman in it with him using the phrase…maybe Ghost Stories?). It doesn’t seem generational, either, because it’s being used by both by a guy who is middle aged, and in one in their 20-30s.
Just to clarify, the OP actually notes both usages, are you saying that you’ve heard the “unreachable” form in a British movie? because that would seem deliberately obtuse to me.
This is one of those coincidences that happen. I had never heard the second meaning (not available, out of the office) until I read this thread. Later that very same day, I saw the phrase used, unmistakably with that meaning, in a book that I had already started reading. So far, it’s the only time in that book that the phrase has been used.
I dunno. It struck me.
More likely, that was an example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion:
Basically, you notice things that you’ve been recently introduced to.
(Later that day…the frequency illusion! I had never heard of that before, and it came up twice today!)
In researching the above answer, I also came across this Wiki page:
Then, no fooling, when looking through my Twitter feed later, I see that someone I follow wrote:
“Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases is one of the Top 10 most essential pages on the internet”
and linked to that page. Whoa! It’s a frequency illusion about pages that discuss frequency illusions. We’re through the looking glass here.
Yep. Good phrase/concept to be aware of. That said, hasn’t happened for me with this particular usage yet, but it’s happened to me sooooo many times in the past with recently discovered definitons, words, concepts, etc.
I thought about that (not those exact terms, but in that ballpark) and I also considered whether, had I run across the use of this common phrase with an obvious meaning with which I was not familiar, I would have questioned it. I think I would have noticed it. So I’m not entirely abandoning my coincidence theory, but I respect the alternative. Coincidences do actually happen, if not as often as we usually think.
For most of my life I’d only heard “out of pocket” used to mean you have to pay for something yourself, unable to rely on insurance or any other third-party source of funds.
Only in the past few years have I heard it used, by corporate types and by my sister (who’s always quick to pick up on new or new-ish slang), to mean they’ll be unreachable because they’re on vacation, a long flight or in a remote area.