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I used to have this on my personal voice mail, back when voice mail was used often since internet was over phone lines. I stopped using it because it confused too many callers. Invariably the first message would be “Hello? Hello? Mark? Fu-” (click). Then there’d be another call with a proper message.
.
You know that I am in habit of giving you a quick reply but this time I am facing difficulty due to the reason that I have to go to attend an annual session which is mandatory for my efficient official working. Therefore, I cannot reply to you on time. I hereby submit my apology for that. After I come back from attending the session, I will respond to all of your emails within a few days, most probably I will join you on 6-01-20XX.
My husband does this with his phone (not a number he uses for work). My parents do this as well and I can’t figure out if it’s due to lack of tech skills or not wanting to deal with voicemails (I think it’s a combination). I had surgery a couple years ago and had to give the hospital all three numbers and then my brother an hour away as backup since he’s the only one besides me with functional voicemail.
The kicker was when she left we teased apart all of what she had been doing and it amounted to about 10 hours a week worth of work (and she was putting in OT constantly lol)
This isn’t about an off-key OOO message, but one where a rogue OOO message drove our department insane for a day and a half.
By now, your neighbourhood supermarket is probably already blasting the classic Christmas tunes, your favourite colleagues are on vacation many miles away, and you’re counting down the days till you get to clear your annual leave 😏
I take advantage of the ability to send different OOO messages to internal or external addresses. Internal addresses get a couple of people to contact if it’s urgent, usually my direct report and my backup person, since between them they can cover pretty much everything I do, or at least they’ll know who can. External addresses get a more general notice: “I am temporarily out of the office. If your message is regarding the Llama Care project and requires a prompt response from our Llama Grooming Team, please make sure that [email protected] is one of the recipients of your message.” Probably not the most elegant phrasing, but we have a distribution list for this very reason. Even requests that they know only I handle are supposed to go to the LG list.
I once had a coworker who attempted to put up an OOO for all of busy season that basically said “I’m busy with urgent deadlines, so please expect a delay in my response.” I think she was asked to take it down.
The other being I did it once at my current job, pointed them to my boss, and he called me every time someone reached out to him. It was SUPER annoying, because not a single thing was time sensitive or really even remotely important, and if I hadn’t given a contact person they would have just waited. But I’m really the only person that does that I do, so when I’m gone, they just have to wait. :shrug:
When I tweeted this, some people argued that the pollster above was using his wife as an excuse. This might be true (and, if so, is probably a bad defense mechanism from some of the work culture habits described earlier). Another possible explanation is that the pollster is telling the truth — his inability to try and balance a vacation with some light work time built in is understandably frustrating and exhausting to those around him.
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Your clients should know when they can expect a response and when you might be unavailable due to unforeseen circumstances.
“some things are MORE important than work” definitely comes off as aggressive to me. “How DARE you email me when I’m doing something MORE IMPORTANT, and for that matter why aren’t YOU spending time with YOUR family?!”
What was weirder is that it took a couple weeks after covid hit for her to turn the message off – which meant that when the entire company was wfh, we would still get an fyi message from her that she was also working from home.
As a person who hates voicemail, I applaud this. Send me an email. Give me a paper trail.
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