14) You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t have received anything at all.
I think the problem is that “at your earliest convenience” is a formulaic convention that uses explicit, almost exaggerated politeness to basically issue a stern direction, meaning “as soon as you possibly can”. When you turn it into “at my earliest convenience” it’s unclear if you mean “whenever it’s convenient for me to get to it” (what the words say) or “as soon as I possibly can” (what the meaning of the formulaic original is). Or else it sounds like you didn’t quite understand how “at your earliest convenience” works.
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Sample Phone Scripts. After Hours Voicemail for a Small Business: Thanks for calling (our company). The office is currently closed. Office hours are 9am to 6pm, Eastern Time. Please leave a message at the tone and we'll call you back on the next business day. Thank you. Voicemail Script: You have reached (your business name).
So, for whatever reason you’re out of the office, your email inbox should be informative with any information about office closures or unexpected absences: Include an expected return date and time. Offer alternative point of contact and their details. Add the general office contact number and email address if you don’t have a specific point of contact. Be friendly and warm in your tone, even if you choose to keep it simple.
Protocol for when you should use an out-of-office message will vary by job and industry, but generally, you should set an OOO message when you’ll be out for two or more days.
Image Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hilarious-out-of-office-email-auto-replies
Hi, I will be away from my desk [MM/DD] until [MM/DD]. For urgent matters, you can contact [name] at [email] or [phone]
The problem with that is people just don’t look at your signature. Whereas they are reasonably likely to notice the OOO message in the email subject header.
When I return from a break, I talk to the people who have acted in my stead and get the rundown of what happened/what needs to still be done. That’s part of my whole “back to work triage”.
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Let us go through the step by step instructions to set out of office messages on iPhone, iCloud email to auto-reply your clients on your next vacation.
I get why that would bug the hell out of you. But on the flip side, having worked with a lot of European colleagues who do this, it’s not that they’ll have to 8 hours of work on vacation, it’s that they won’t be working at all. So if your bit isn’t done by X date, then their bit won’t get done until they return. That’s just the culture there.
I’m so glad not to have to work at [insert company] any more that I am literally high on life.
I once had a coworker who would put up OOOs for absolutely everything, and it irked me to an unreasonable level. Spending the afternoon working with a colleague on a project? OOO. Just returned from vacation and trying to catch up? OOO. A lot of meetings that day? OOO.
They only discovered this AFTER the Christmas rush. Thankfully there were no client meltdowns that year or it could have been a lot worse.
That message was definitely too long, and while I see it was meant to be funny/snarky, I can see where it would be grating / easy to misinterpret.
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.