Advance OOO Auto Response Surprised All

Whenever people go on vacation, they leave an Auto Responder Email that starts the day vacation begins.  So on one fine day, you want some important information from a colleague and send an email. Boom. You get an auto responder that reveals the vacation plan. Then you have to scramble for an alternative, dig for yourself or follow the escalation route.

So, I thought, I will act little sensible and help my team plan better. At my work, on a daily basis I work with colleagues from multiple global locations; India, China and France (no more teams in Russia now). I thought it would be lot more helpful to inform about my Vacation at least a week ahead so that we all can plan work around me.

So I set my Auto Responder, exactly one week ahead, informing I will be out of office from next week and contact so and so in my absence.

I have no clue that my advance notice, with intent to plan better, would create such a stir. Got swamped with a bunch of emails quickly asking for ‘kind’ of an explanation, why did you do that? I am totally surprised. So did the rest of the team and some even got confused as they didn’t look at the date in the notice. And it led to multiple discussions; in the aisle, over lunch and little everywhere (:-)).

It took some more explaining and few more emails to settle the dust. Whew!!