I’d then check off all that applied—people would laugh each time they saw it bc I’m such a predictable nerd, one or both of the first two lines was almost always checked off…and usually both!
I wrote the above comment off the top of my head. I wish I had time to rewrite and edit it. I would have changed “their goldfish” to “a spider they accidentally stepped on”, and would have added more detail to the story of the sister’s death (e.g. “her Pomeranian yapping” rather than the less descriptive “her dog barking”). Unfortunately, I could not do the thorough writing job required for that comment because someone close to me recently … – The person whose out of office advertised his gig on the weekend, for anyone in travelling to [city] – The people in a certain department who have taken to saying things like “if you really need to contact me, call 000-YYY-XXXX where Y is the square root of [insert numbers] and X is the year plutonium was discovered.” – The ones where people have an auto response saying they only check their emails once a day between 1-2pm – “I’m on research leave and I may be slow to reply.” (Whereby it is guaranteed they will reply immediately, because academics do not *really* take breaks).

I thought it was funny but could never get away with using something like that at my org. I loved the “competent people who work for me” part – I make this joke all the time. We have some people who feel that they should have a manager personally attend to them and, at least in my case, my highly competent team is in the weeds of that work a lot more and are not rusty (like I am).
Naturally, she had to take the day off — and couldn’t let folks know with any old generic auto-response. Instead, she made a guessing game of it in her out-of-office email, which you can use for yourself, below.