She continues: “However, there should be a way for whoever is emailing you to have an urgent request handled, and that should be included as part of your OOO as well as being known to your work team (supervisor and colleagues). That might look like including a coworker's email on your OOO or it might simply involve setting a forwarding rule for while you're away, so that your email goes to the colleague who's covering.”
When one of my colleagues is out of the office, he doesn’t mess around. In fact, he’s turned his auto-responses into a running series of commentary from fictional cartoon character Troy McClure.

I use a basic OOO message – “Hi! I’m out of the office x date(s). I will return your email when I’m back at my computer on x date. If you have an urgent matter, please contact x or y. Have a nice weekend/holiday/etc!/Thanks!” My office WANTS us to use more personal and witty OOO messages like this article’s message. And that stresses me out. I don’t want to spend time worried about whether my OOO is witty. I don’t want to annoy other people just looking for basic info like when am I back and who they can contact in the meantime. I correspond a lot with third parties on serious matters (legal), and I don’t think a message like that is appropriate. So, I just keep using my basic message and hope my supervisor’s supervisor doesn’t email me and see that I’m not “trying.” Ugh.
We’re not saying you’re boring but you do work in a fairly serious corporate environment. As a result, your out of office needs to be quite to the point but you also like to throw in a little pitch too, you cheeky sod.