We’re always busy. Sometimes we’re too busy even for work. This is where out of office message comes in.
Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message. This message is automated because until [DATE] because I’m moving to [LOCATION]. That’s right. A cross country road trip from [CITY] to [CITY]. I’ll get back to you when we pull into the driveway.
.
Jony Ive teams up with Ferrari to develop electric carBlackstone hits jackpot with $5.7bn Cosmopolitan casino saleBHP shareholders urged to vote against climate planLego sales and profits surge to record highsGoldman-owned Petershill Partners rebounds after London debut falls
How to Set Out-of-Office Auto Reply Text Message on iPhone for Calls and Messages
I misread that at first and thought you’d said that a random picture of a employee popped up, and was momentarily horrified at the thought of my face appearing on my co-workers screens!
The holiday season is coming, and the number one thing you would like to do before packing your bags or planning your trip is to write an out-of-office email. The vacation season falls at different times at different places across the globe, and you need to keep your auto-replies in place before you head towards a happy vacation. If you are thinking about writing an amazing out-of-office email for your auto respondent, I got your back. I am bringing up the list of top 10 amazingly creative out-of-office emails backed by marketers and email developers that you can use this holiday season. Read the article to get inspired:
Mine tend towards the latter for both internal and external and only get a little more expository if it’s a closedown period and I’m adding leave to one end of it, but that’s a simple “The organisation is shut between X and Y. For emergencies during this time please contact Team. I am on leave between Z and B and will not be accessing my email during this time. Please contact Email Address if your enquiry is urgent otherwise I will attend to your email as soon as is practicable upon my return.”
Oh you see, I do that on purpose. That way I can use the same OOO message internally and externally. Anyone within our company can find us in the global address book. Anyone outside our company who has done business with my department has my email address & my manager’s.
It definitely sounds like something my boss would write and I laughed at it. In our work, everyone thinks that they’re a special emergency all the time. Stopping to think “if I don’t have this in the next two days what will the actual consequences be” is a thing that should happen more but doesn’t.
“Hi, Thank you for contacting me. I’m currently out of the office for a conference and will not be available until [date]. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
I wouldn’t hate voicemail so much if people were better at leaving voice mails– If your voice mail is much longer than 30 seconds, you’re doing it wrong! If it’s just “It’s Bob, call me back”, you’re also doing it wrong! The voicemail sweet spot is something like this:
“We all need breaks from time to time. Today I will be disconnecting from all things work, and going for a walk to smell the roses and soak in the sunshine.”
My favorite was one the one that said “I am out of the office and don’t plan on ever returning.”
Website: https://www.eou.edu/coronavirus/2020/03/24/march-24-2020-voicemail-and-phone-instructions-when-working-from-home/
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.
It was a commodities trading firm. I still barely know what they do. But, I would answer the phone, listen to whatever they said, understand not much and then I would say “lemme put you on hold” and then I would turn to the nearest person not on the phone and I’d say something dumb like “They’re calling about like…salt maybe?” And then I’d transfer to that person and they would figure out who it went to. (They all knew who was trading what that day. Nobody ever told me.)
My pet peeves are too much personal information (no need to tell me your cousin had a hysterectomy) and the ones that are carbon dated, e.g. from 2018.