During winter break, certain essential services must still be provided on our campuses, such as hospital operations at UTMC, approved research activities and public safety. Therefore, winter break does not include UTMC employees nor certain required positions, which might vary annually depending on need.
Given free rein, I’d absolutely love to tell people that needing me to show them how to do X in Excel is actually not a vacation-interrupting emergency and there are tons of free videos that would explain that, if they did not want to contact the actual departments who handle tech support and training. Or that this project they’ve known about for a month but decided to keep under their hat until it became an emergency is something they’ll need to resolve themselves. But that would not fly at all.

I also do not have an OOO for external people – only internal. I always monitor my email enough to be able to forward important external emails to the right person to handle. IDK why, I just don’t like them having the burden of emailing someone else if I’m out. I’d rather my employee contact them and say “Hey, DataQueen let me know you were having an issue and asked me to connect with you.” My last CEO was out for a full year and almost none of our clients knew (we weren’t trying to hide it, it was just not pertinent to them).
I’ve seen those before (also for maternity or for people who were taking extended leave). I really appreciate it, personally — it basically lets the sender know that the ball IS still in their court, which I don’t see as inherently offensive or attitudy.