Pretentious out of office reply

[beebreath]

My out of office is usually

I'm on annual leave please contact ...

Or

I'm out of office until date. If urgent please contact (name )

There is someone in another department to me who really annoys me with

I am attending ' names very important meeting or convention ' please contact ...

Why say which 'important ' meeting you are ? I just see this is pretentious bullshit or is it me ?

“I will be out of the office from X date to Y date. On my return all email sent during this period will be deleted unread. If your email is important, please resend it after Y date.”

I think this is quite common in France and Germany. I’d quite like it, though I wouldn’t be allowed to do it.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28786117

beebreath Yes, it is irritating - the only justification would be if you were going somewhere where the emailer might be able to talk to you in person. I am too lazy to do anything other than the standard ‘I’m on holiday/at meeting no access to email’ out of office. That way I don’t need to retype it when it happens again!

havingtochangeusernameagain many, many years ago, I discovered if you deleted a message with a read receipt on, without opening it, the recipient got a message stating it had been deleted without being opened. You could then pull it back out of trash, and read /delete/forward to HR as harrassment in your own time, without further messages being sent to the writer. Dont know if it still works tho?

I had an amazing one which was obviously someone who had had an extremely bad time, saying they were no longer in charge and were on leave for 6 weeks.
I shall look it out today.

We had a manager who wrote the same thing, ie, emails will be deleted and not read, seems fair enough really if you are really busy.

If in out of the office for a period of time I will sometimes list approximately what I’m doing so people know what to expect of me. So something like
I am out of the office from A to F; from A to B I am on training and will endeavour to read and respond to e-mails outside of the course, from C to D I will be on annual leave and will not access my mail, from E to F I will be working from X office and will receive e-mail as usual.
I hope this is information that is useful to people. We are also told not to give out other people’s e-mail addresses by name but just to say to contact X colleague who can be found in the company address book, which is fine for the internal reply but utterly rubbish for external people who don’t have the company address book! When I was being recruited my HR contact went on mat leave and left a message like this so I had no way to contact the company! I ended up e-mailing someone from that company who’d given me his card at a conference and asking them to look up the e-mail address I needed!

But is it always irrelevant? I’ve just done a big trade show. If someone from one of our global offices gets an OOTO reply saying ‘I’m at said show’, they know I might check my emails over lunch or at the end of the day. If it says ‘I’m on holiday’, they know to try someone else.
This ^^. If I know someone is on holiday I'll not expect a response until they get back and have had the chance to go through emails. If they're at a conference I'll keep in mind that they might read it and reply; my next action might change or be postponed if there's a chance of a reply whereas if I know I won't get an answer then I might crack on in a different way. Equally I might send a follow up telling them they can ignore that one and I'll do x instead so if they do check on holiday they don't need to feel obliged to respond. I can't see the problem.
And I enjoyed the dragon-slaying one too!

I'm senior in my company and I never bother with an OOO unless I am physically going away on holiday for a week or more.

Email is not a medium to be relied on for immediate reaction, so I'll pick up anything within a reasonable timeframe anyway. If it's actually urgent they'll call or Skype me.

When I do put it on, I tell people the dates I am away from-to and to contact my manager if necessary. So people naturally only go to them if it is genuinely important/urgent.

I can't stand people who expect immediate responses to email.

hopeishere DH used to print and keep every email he was sent

Many moons ago I worked with a really up-herself woman who, on her return from any leave, would imperiously request not to be disturbed till further notice.

She would then print every single email in her inbox in date order.
So that meant she'd print the original email from John.
Then the email with the reply from Clare to John's email.
Then the email with John replying to Clare.
etc.

Not just the latest one with the entire chain. Every. Single. Email in the chain. So she'd end up with a stack of paper an inch thick.

Then she'd set about actioning the emails from bottom up, without checking to see if it had been resolved further up her inbox.

I've no idea how she managed to stay employed, it was a car crash each time.

Oakes nwjcsm
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You ok poppet31?

I include my destination in my OOO because often I'm going to a different time zone and don't want people ringing me in the middle of the night

My petty arsehole manager used to set his OOO to deliberately exclude me from the management chain. He would say 'contact XX junior person' rather than me, as his deputy.

He thought he was being a master of passive aggression, but actually it was win win for me. He directed all the work to someone else, and I have a lovely stack of printed OOO from him as evidence for the Employment Tribunal .

How did that pettiness work out for you arsehole manager?

@unescorted We have to list our letters...makes me cringe

Dragaon - what if you just...don't?

Quietly delete them one day and see if anyone even notices.

We have an ongoing row in our office about out of office messages because one of our senior management “doesn’t believe in them”. She believes we truly should be contactable by our clients 24/7/365. It’s very depressing. We live our working lives like that most of the time and I desperately need some actual time off where i don’t need to be worrying about checking my emails.

@Buzz I would love to, but it's on all of our internal and external correspondence. It may be fun to add in all the random certificates like 100m swimming, Blue Peter badge etc on internal mail though

So don't check them 24/7?

She can call/email/text you if she thinks you desperately need to hear something at 3am Sunday morning or whatever; and then you can either respond to it or not.

What is actually going to happen if you don't?

I have a wanky colleague who does this - at important conference then back to back meetings. I think he wants more emails!
He loves to open Outlook each morning and say 'wow! I've had 5 million emails!' as if it's something to boast about......

We are not allowed OOO notices. My office manager hates them with passion, so has set our system up that we all get (almost) all emails that come in. It is such a joy when you come back from holiday to wade through over a thousand emails . Even over Christmas, when no one worked it was over 400.

Sometimes it would be convenient to be able to write "I'm at this trade show until xx" as, in all likelihood, quite a few of my customers would be there at least one day and could come by.

Two family members in Germany work for the company mentioned in the BBC piece, and they both love that they don't come back from holiday to a large number of unanswered emails.

The worst out of office reply I've had was a link to their sponsorship page for a run they were doing, good idea but a CF.

DH's out of office always says "I am currently out of the office until X date." Drives. Me. Bonkers. You are either currently out of the office, or you are out of the office until.

Yes, I'm petty.

Howdy! I'm off for a while watching boxsets in my pants, if it that important then contact X

I rather like that, actually And, seriously, it does make the point that people are allowed (actually, entitled) to do whatever the fuck they want when they're off work on hols. Things like 'I'm at such-and-such conference' or 'I'll be looking at emails periodically' IMO feed into the cultural message that we should all be doing work things and be contactable all the time, and if we're not then we need to justify why not.

A colleague of mine took a career break to go travelling and her out of office stated "I am currently on unpaid leave"- it really made me cringe! Why did anyone need to know the particulars of her finances 😂

Off topic but I hate it when people send me an email and then call to see if I received their email! Yes, I did! I’m on top of my emails! I can see your email!

Irrational, I know.

I honestly don't care, I'm just grateful people have bothered to put an out of office on so I know not to expect a quick reply and to contact someone else if it is urgent.

Also, some of the people I work with will say they are at a particular thing so that if we really, really need to get hold of them we would know how to do that.

My out of office is always the same and very boring "I am out of the office until x date with no access to emails, if you require response before then, please contact colleague abc on ext 1234"