1

Let’s imagine this scenario: you’ve submitted your time off, your OOO reply is set, and your bags are basically packed… but wait — did you automate the thing?

Whether it’s silencing non-critical alerts, auto-responding to tickets, or kicking off a glorious maintenance workflow, what’s that one thing you automate to keep things in order (or at least hanging in there) before going to sip something cold? :tropical_drink:

Remember you’re on time to enter our summer giveaway. Tell us your summer horror story and let’s wait for people to spice it up!

4 Spice ups
2

Since there’s always at least one of us in the office, there’s no need to make any system-level changes before taking off. Whatever comes up, will be handled just like it always is.

3 Spice ups
3

Oh that’s an amazing setup!

Curious to know what smaller teams would do :thinking:

1 Spice up
4

Nothing. My #1 rule is to never change the status quo just before disappearing. You
just know you lit the fuse on the time bomb doing this…

The converse is, the place can function to at least some level without me, people know who else to call if something disastrous happens, and who to call for stupid things, and the rest goes on a memo on my desk..

So…pre-planning is just operating with the assumption that something can go wrong at any time, not just when I am on vacation…

At least, that’s the theory :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

6 Spice ups
5

You know I like this way of thinking! Let’s not manifest chaos

2 Spice ups
6

My Out Of Office reply.

5 Spice ups
7

I never set OOO for emails…

Some modern OOO are just too stupid and start creating loops especially when there are “Enterprise” mass emailers (from MS, AWS, VMware, Broadcom, Telcos etc) especially when they forget to Bcc and send out emails with massive mailing lists and people start to have automated OOO “reply to all”, then others also reply to all with regarding to the OOO they got…

Like if they sent out event invitations with 100 emails, I can get 30 “OOO” replies then 10 may have “OOO replies” to the “OOO”… this gets worse during the festive periods…

Then worse is when these sales persons or event organisers do an “email recall” (email sent to everyone with an email saying that “we would like to recall the email”) which start another round of OOO & “OOO replies”…

3 Spice ups
8

I set OOO for internal-only emails, for that very reason. Internally, before sending that email to everyone, we see a flag that tells us how many people are set to out of office and we can choose to take them out of the mailing, or not…but it helps to have that set so people know not to expect a response from me right away.

3 Spice ups
9

You and me both, my friend.

2 Spice ups
10

Yes! And my OOO message always includes who to contact in case of emergency (not me!)

3 Spice ups
11

We used to call it executive tennis.

Joe goes on vacation, sets out of office autoresponder.
Sam is going on vacation also, but in a last minute
flurry of pointless productivity, he dashes off a note to Joe, then
sets his mail to out of office.

Joe’s mail then replies to Sam, Sams mail then replies to Joe,
which replies to Sam…

A week later you get 2 tickets about mailbox quota exceeded…

3 Spice ups
12

When we first setup ServiceNOW at a previous job, we had to create all sorts of mail rules ourselves to prevent mail loops like that…we’d have thousands of tickets pouring in because someone copied the ticket-generating mailbox on an email that went to someone out of the office who had checked ‘include OOTO with outside’ and that was fun…got our ticket count really high! Skewed our KPI’s because of all the tickets generated and closed in such a short time :rofl:

1 Spice up
13

2 Spice ups