Sorry, I’m away from work this week …

OOF!

Out-of-office messages are a running record of people trying to escape for vacation. An auto-reply attempting to handle work requests while you’re away.

I’ve been sick this week, and I wondered if I’d kill my streak and miss writing (I’m feeling better). It reminded me how missing work used to stress me out.

Which reminded me of OOFs.

No one knows why Microsoft’s version is called OOF instead of OOO. Perhaps it’s rooted in the Xenix-based email system the company used before Exchange (Out-of-Facility?).

Regardless, in this post I refer to these messages that fly pleadingly from screen-to-screen, begging for a break from work as OOFs (rhymes with goofs).

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That first “sorry” is some bs. Whether they read your OOF message from an automatic response to an email, or see it in your Slack/Teams status, everyone knows the last thing you are is sorry. No, you’re thrilled to be off work and you’re having a blast doing a bunch of things you’ve been planning, or doing a bunch of nothings you’ve been needing.

The waiting room at the doc was full, so i sat at the kids table where I discovered Martian Manhunter in the DC Lego Superhero Guide. Now I want to be him. His superpowers include: Mental Telepathy, Flight, Super-Strength, Invulnerability, Shape-Shifting and Great Wisdom.

Performative certainly, but “sorry” is doing work here. You want whoever is looking for you while you’re out, to chill and not make a mess you’ll have to deal with when you come back. Or — worst case scenario — escalate it into something your boss decides is worth interrupting your vacation for.

So, it’s not enough to finish your OOF with something like “I’ll get back to you when I return.” You need a safety valve, so you add a second sentence that starts something like this:

“If your matter is urgent …”

Here, the word “urgent” is doing the work. You hope your co-workers are rational and understand the meaning of ‘urgent’ and accordingly wait for you to get back. They’re not rational and they will escalate the silliest things.

Another strategy is a designated backup.

Point to a designate in your OOF and make sure they are also OOF. Have them do the same but redirected to a third person, also OOF. The circular summer vacation OOF-web. After enough bounces, you’ve distributed responsibility so broadly, the requestor simply gives up and starts planning their own vacation.

Crafting the perfect OOF is a mini workplace writing genre packed with signals of busyness and importance. I’ve read short essays following the ellipses with a full org chart and flowchart-like instructions on who to contact depending on each category of urgent request.

Exotic destinations are often included as a plea and a brag that you’re somewhere the electrons just cannot find you. Regardless of what you write, there are certain people who will immediately pick up their phone to hunt you down.

One summer, I was a couple hours into a hike at 8,000 feet, high up in the Sierras, when a salesman caught me on my mobile to handle an escalation from my customer Intel.

My family startled at my sudden loud conversation, edging farther and farther away from me as I took the call, work interrupting the winding journey of the trail. I stopped and perched on a rock, pulling my backpack around to absentmindedly sip water. I stared at my phone, incredulous I had two bars up here, mad at myself for picking up. I listened to them panic over servers crashing in a datacenter far, far away, as I stared blankly across the canyon toward the Sierra crest the PCT follows¹.

That day, the separation between life and work came into vivid focus.

The hike to Point Mariah. Secret hike link in footnote.

I’ve tried all the OOF techniques; I ended here:

I’m out on vacation so I won’t get your message. If it’s important, call me when I’m back.

Short:

Returning 8-25. Cope until then.

Cocky:

Out of office, Thursday March 31. Back on Friday.
If you are injured, dial 911.

When I was a manager I made it easy — send them to me:

Hi, I’m on vacation, I’ll be back next week. If you need something before then, ask my manager.

Anything I could do to help separate the world of work from the world of away was a good thing. But do they really have to be two separate places?

While long weekends are a good break, a week is better and two weeks better still. It took me a week to shake the work out of my head.

I tried to save my time for three weeks straight every summer with my kids.

Then, a gift: a sabbatical. It was two months and you could throw in vacation time and extend it to three months. No OOF can be written to cover an entire quarter of work.

I asked around for advice on how to use this gift and people said after one month away, you’ll be dying to come back to work. So I used all my vacation and took three months.

At the end, I was not dying to go back to work.

On my first day back, I started plotting my escape. It took me six more years to pull it off, and after I left, a few more to remake my life, but now work and away are the same place.

1. Secret hike: Point Mariah to Sterlings Canyon