Thank you for your message. I’m on sick leave and will get back to you as soon as I return to the office.
This is one reason I rarely give a contact person. My company is terrible at communication, and not only could you easily be sent on a OOO chain, you could also be emailing someone who is out who didn’t even use OOO.
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The first Veterans Day under the new law was observed with much confusion on October 25, 1971. It was quite apparent that the commemoration of this day was a matter of historic and patriotic significance to a great number of our citizens, and so on September 20th, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford signed Public Law 94-97 (89 Stat. 479), which returned the annual observance of Veterans Day to its original date of November 11, beginning in 1978. This action supported the desires of the overwhelming majority of state legislatures, all major veterans service organizations and the American people.
The head of llama engagement called my boss and reamed her out for my “poor behaviour” and then called me and reamed me out, too. She said it didn’t matter if project X was the biggest thing our company did all year – her requests took precedence.
That said, I do realize that I can’t just not use my phone at work. I’m surprised she has not been called on it by her coworkers yet!
[BUSINESS] is in no way endorsing or not endorsing said holiday, nor encouraging or discouraging employees of all demographic clusters to engage in celebrity activities. Thank you for your consideration during this festive or not-festive time.
I personally like it. Of course, the emails that I’ve seen still say what to do if the matter is urgent and needs to be handled now — but as a person who gets 100+ emails a day, whether I tell you I’m deleting all of them when I get back or not — if it is in the thousands of emails that might accumulate in the time I am off, I’m not going to see it or respond. Better that I tell you now that you are going to have to resend the email after I return (or get my backup to handle it now) than you sit around waiting for a response that is never going to come. It is actually pretty common in my industry for any absence two weeks or more.
Agreed! A bit of warmth is fine, sure, but it’s not the place for chattiness — that’s for talking to an actual person. I want an OOO message to tell me that the person is out, when they’ll be back, and who I should contact in the meantime if need be. No objections to multiple options there, whether it’s “X for llama grooming issues and Y for llama tea parties” or “X for routine questions, Y if it’s urgent, Z if it’s an emergency,” but I want to be able to absorb the useful info quickly and move on.
That’s what I always reasoned… better to annoy with too much information that saves hassle on the backend then be brief upfront and sentence people to OoO purgatory.
Hi, I’m out of the office. Thank you for getting in touch. We’ll get back to you within 8 business hours.
Editor's Note: This was originally posted in July 2018 and updated and republished on the date posted in the article. Enjoy!
Try this out with your colleagues or share it with colleagues/clients headed off on a vacation to send them off in style:
That’s the way ours is set up, so anyone who was emailing that guy at the time would have seen it.
Some people keep theirs quite corporate and formal, adopting a to-the-point notification, i.e.:
Also known as “autoresponder emails,” out-of-office messages run the gamut. From funny, to clever, to snarky, this message can both show your personality and let senders know that, well, you’re out of office.
I apologize in advance for any inconvenience that this may cause you, and I want you to know that I can help you rectify this if you contact me on the email or phone number below.
I would follow up with my coworkers before I follow up with an outside client. “I see an email from Wakeen asking for a copy of the 2020 TPS report. Before I follow up with him, did anyone get him the copy?” It just make a department look dysfunctional if they can’t communicate internally and get their act together before contacting an outside person.