Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and
Most awkward/painful one I ever saw was a former co-worker. ~10 years ago when he left on paternity leave, he said as much in his out of office. The baby was stillborn. It stayed up for the month or so until he returned. Those of us in the same office of course knew the situation, but we regularly communicated directly with multiple offices in different states and countries. The very first time I saw it I was overcome with dread about how many congratulations he would receive and have to tell the story to. I was much younger and afraid to rock the boat then, but I think now I would push his manager and IT to use their ability to access his account and change it.
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I worked at an office where we used OOO messages on voicemail pretty regularly and if we forgot to change the message, our callers were quick to tell us the outgoing message was outdated. That end date feature would have been a big help for us! A local council in Wales needed to get a road sign translated into Welsh. (All official signs in Wales have to be in both English and Welsh.) They got an out of office message in Welsh from the translator they contacted, assumed that was the translation and printed the out of office message on the sign. They didn’t realise their mistake till a Welsh speaker pointed it out…
Perhaps I’m you guys’ worst nightmare, but for the past couple of years I’ve been writing haikus for my OOO, which give a flavour of what I’m out doing. A couple of examples:
The kicker is that they all get back on August 1st and are mad that their projects haven’t moved forward.
Q. Who should notify contractors, vendors and other individuals who work with various University departments that their services may not be needed during winter break?
Visuals always work whether used in messages or elsewhere. In fact, communications that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only messages.
That is kind of glorious. And it does make sense when the person you’re emailing is gone for months. I did something similar my last mat leave except I didn’t explicitly state it, and lo and behold, people figured out that I wasn’t going to catch their email from a month or so earlier unless they brought it up again.
I worked with a guy years ago who would update his voicemail greeting literally every time he left the office. So the bare minimum would be that he’d record a new message when he arrived in the office in the morning. Then, when leaving for lunch he’d record a new greeting listing the time he would be back in the office, then he’d record a new message when he got back from lunch, then a new one at the end of the day saying he would be back in the morning. That’s not even counting the times he was out of the office on work business. It was deranged, especially since he had the type of job where he would normally be in and out of the office often.
Amanda works at HubSpot, and she came with a unique auto respondent that asked her contacts to guess where she is. To give background, she flew down to Boston to attend a Red Sox training game in the spring with her father. She chose to ask her contacts whether where they think she might be, and also this played some wonderful use of litotes here:
I will be out of the office on Thursday, November 8th, and Friday, November 9th. I will be back in the office on Monday, November 12th, and will not be responding to any emails until that time.
In case of maternity leave, make sure that you set up a long-term out of office message.
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Yes, qualifiers can be helpful. Limited vs no email access, out of the office versus working off site, regular out of the office versus extended leave, etc.
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Okay. So, it’s not to my exact personal tastes — to me, it’s overly wordy — but it’s probably fine for their culture and I’d be mildly amused if I got it. I see where you’re seeing condescension, but I think you can read it without that too.
They happen when you have at least two auto-reply systems set to respond to every single email that somehow start messaging each other.