seen it a few times yeah, the type of people who work in IT and have a do stand up at weekends
the last place I worked at made the service guys put something like:
"Hi,
Although * global telecommunications company * is all about connectivity and reaching anyone anytime I am currently unavailable to answer your query. Etc"
Personally I’d nationalise out of office replies.
In my old job we had an auto reply for the main customer service address (thanks for emailing [company], your email is very important to us, etc). Sometimes our auto reply would get in an argument with someone’s out of office and we’d get an inbox full of “on annual leave until 7 July”
One this used to happen fairly regularly with was a nun, whose auto reply was simply “thank you for your email. God bless you”
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discovered today that Outlook will show you an Out of Office reply when you tag the person into the address bar, before you’ve even tried to send it. magical.
I got this today - ‘out of office until further notice’ I’ll just wait by my computer until the end of time for you. fs
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In the late 90s Ofsted had an email system that didn’t do the clever thing of only sending one out of office email to each recipient.
This meant their entire email system could be taken down by an email to a group of people where more than one was out of office as the two accounts would just bounce out of office replies back and forth to each other until a crash.
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Yeah the new Outlook is pretty clever like that. It also puts a purple star in the corner of their little online status box.
Probably emergency sick leave or close family bereavement 
When I put my out of office on couple of weeks back I accidentally said I was off for about 6 weeks instead of 3 days. Worked brilliantly as all the people that usually pester me didn’t cotton on I was back for at least a week. And what a week!
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My boss makes me put on an out of office reply when I’m working off-site, even though I’ll be replying to emails as normal. Annoys me as it creates false expectations for when I actually am out of office.
Might start putting one on everytime I go to lunch ‘if you want me I’ll probably be in Pret’
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Have a friend/colleague whose out of office says he’ll ‘read the email’ on his return. Absolutely no promise of doing anything beyond that. Great tactic.
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Also, if she emails me and Ive forgotten to put one on, she’ll send another email saying ‘do you have an out of office on?’ Clearly I don’t, you passive aggressive micro manager.
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A few people at my place have started using “I’m out of the office until xx. If your email is important, please resend after that date.”
Wankers.
Wow that’s really unprofessional - “I’m basically going to ignore it unless you nag me”
Yep. I guess they just delete everything when they get back, which is kind of tempting…
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Fuck this. Whole thread is making me angry.
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Oh gosh, that’s just made me properly angry. That sort of person will then send an email to the whole team:
“Just a gentle reminder could all staff please make sure they put their out of office on”
(Micro managers usually have shite punctuation / grammar skills, just to rub salt into the wounds).
The worst is when you get back then at 9:05 someone email you “your out of office is still on”. FUCK OFF DICKHEAD
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