What does your out of office say?

The out of office message is a dangerous thing, isn’t it?

We have a colleague in our office that is universally unpopular. He has upset or alienated almost everyone in his close team and a number of other people besides, including his Executive Director. He has had numerous public rows with people on a range of topics and is, to put it bluntly, not just a loose cannon but also a fruit loop of the first order. How he has survived this long is a mystery to all of us.

He is on leave at the moment, and has taken the opportunity to place a different message in his Outlook diary for every day he is away. Some just blandly say “I am on leave today, please contact Mrs X”. Others are more interesting:-

“I am being harassed at work and taking time off due to the stress. Contact someone else”

….and

“I am stressed out with the pressure at work and am having to take time off. My Manager might deal with your enquiry”.

Needless to say, so one was aware of this until a contractor sent him a message and got the day’s reply, then contacted his manager and reported it. Then everyone scrambled around trying to get access to his email account to change it, but because he is an IT geek himself he had protected it and that took ages.

Great amusement all round for colleagues, some embarrassment for Managers. He’ll be for it when he gets back, no question.

Of course the key issue here is that by and large we have to trust our colleagues to be responsible and behave appropriately in the office and when they are disgruntled or upset, many don’t want to play ball. They will leave inappropriate emails, blank out calendars to be unavailable and send ill advised messages to others without a thought for the consequences, or possibly not caring about them. And once it is in the system, it’s almost impossible to get it back and retrieve the situation.

I remember leaving a past organisation acrimoniously and putting a message on my Outlook which said “I no longer work for this dreadful organisation. Your message will not be dealt with. Try contacting someone else in the team”. My boss went ballistic, I refused to take the message down and stood my ground until I left later that day. By that time, several people had seen it and messaged back “don’t blame you”. Task accomplished, I think.

But at least I was leaving – this bloke has to come back and face the music. Possibly not for long. We’ll see!