If you work in an office large enough that you have to wonder if anyone is stealing the Swiss Roll out of your lunch in the communal refrigerator (and the answer is, "I have no idea what you're talking about, or where those crumbs on my shirt came from."), you know there's sort of an unwritten checklist you have to go through before you leave for any extended period of time.
You have to cancel all the meetings that will be held while you're gone. Then you have to fight the impulse to cancel all the meetings that will be held after you return. Then you have to make sure every living soul in the building, including the visitors and those guys who are actually there to drywall something, know you're going to be "gone all next week to (fill in the blank)."
Then you've got to take out the trash. As a person who worked in the same area with someone who tossed a half-eaten hamburger in her can, then left for two weeks in China, yeah, you want to make sure that gets done.
And then, just before you dash out the door, visions of beachfront condos not believed to be in the path of any named tropical storms for at least the next week dancing in your head, you've got to cap off your exit strategy by firing up the equivalent of an Internet butler, your "out-of-office" message.
All right, for those who have taken up lighthouse keeping (or something like that), out-of-office notifications are electronic messages that automatically respond, informing senders of email that you're not available to reply and letting them know when you'll be back.
They can be set up by hitting that button at the top of the email and then, wait, no, that's not it. You click on the File button and from there ... hold it, that's not right, either. OK, so, you try to find the directions you printed off the last time you had to do this, and realize you just threw them out with the trash. All right, last time, you ask someone half your age with earbuds in. They always know how to do this stuff.
The problem with out-of-offices -- or would that be outs-of-office? -- is that while most office communication falls into fairly predictable, somewhat pre-defined patterns (use the phrase "go-forward basis" a lot and talk about "leaning in"), out-of-office notifications give us a chance to freelance a bit.
And that may not be in many people's wheelhouse, as it were. Which means the actual message we use to convey a fairly straightforward thought ("I'm not here, so, I really have a good reason to ignore your email, unlike all the other times when I just ignore it without a good reason") might be lacking a little in the clarity department.
Which means they fall somewhere on a scale with two polar extremes.
There's the drill sergeant-like, "Not here, out of town, not checking emails, voice mails, chain mail, snail mail or male and female. If written I will not answer, if text-messaged I will not respond. No one gets to email the Wizard. That is all: Now drop and give me 20."
Then there's the "well, maybe I'll be checking and maybe I won't. I'll try to but I can't guarantee anything, but I'll sure try to, except I'm being super passive-aggressive, which means you'll spend the week waiting for a reply that won't come until I'm in the airport on Sunday when it's already too late and you've moved on. Have a nice day."
There are variations. Some include the incredibly ambitious quasi-guarantee that you'll "be answering all emails when you return." Mostly because you don't want to admit you're going to check for the names of anyone who can fire you, delete the rest and claim a virus must have gotten into your system.
You may also include a list of people to contact, "in case this is an emergency," which means a collection of people with even less of a clue than you have are about to be sucked into something they can't possibly fix at a point where it very much needs to be fixed. And that you can count on a lot fewer Christmas cards this year.
Now if this all sounds like a really bad idea to you, if you fear you're going to slow down the process, serve teammates poorly and generally return to a collection of very unhappy campers, don't worry. Chances are, you didn't set up the out-of-office response properly, and you didn't actually leave any message at all.
Definitely one way to make technology work for you.
Commentary on 09/15/2017