I will be out of the office today and returning someday. Just kidding, my office is in my home, so I am not out of it very much… except for when I am just plain “out of it” as they say. An errant out of the office message from a friend serving his time in Corporameia brought back memories of my days in that land of corporate silliness.
Back in the day, we had to send the ubiquitous Out of the Office or OOTO message every time we left the corporate headquarters to work in another location, or simply to be out of the office for vacation or illness or even feigned death. To my knowledge, I was the first one in our company to use the acronym, OOTO, to save typing time. That little grape is one that should never have rolled out of the wine press. Had I realized the ugly little raisin that misplaced grape would become, I would have tossed it back in to be smashed.
As with all well-intentioned, but ill-advised acronyms, this one grew completely out of hand, or OOH, you might say to save words. Little OOTO soon unleashed the cruel and twisted creative spirit of acronymitis within the company. Out of the Office messages with OOO for Out of Office; OOT for Out of Town, OFTD for Out for the Day, and even OOFSA for Out of freakin’ stupid Acronyms began to circulate in a perfect maelstrom of acronym inflation. Now in most cases the resulting stream, or is that scream, of creativity would be fun to watch. But the lowly OOTO message became automated.
As the company progressed through the various software packages such as Groupwise and Outlook, the ability to place an automatic OOTO response on every incoming message turned the monster loose. While it became one of those corporate requirements from on high to have an automatic OOTO response, no one thought of what might happen if a few people all left for a conference at the same time. All that was needed was one innocent message to one of the absent group, and a whirlwind of automatic OOTO responses would bounce endlessly between e-mail accounts until the server shutdown or all inboxes were filled.
To combat this menace of OOTO reproduction, the e-mail recipients would create Out of the Office folders and rules to place all incoming OOTO messages safely away from any useful notice. As the department grew to an unwieldy size as with many corporate IT departments, the OOTO folders came to be checked less and less. Soon, bosses could be found wandering the halls of Corporameia, that land of corporate silliness many of us have come to find ourselves in, asking such amusing questions as: “Where are all my people?” A corporate Good Samaritan would stop from time to time and ask them, “Have you checked your group’s OOTO folder?” The boss would then retreat to his or her office to wade through the countless OOTO messages to find out that the entire department had scheduled an offsite team-building session to discuss better communication with the boss.
Ah, I’m glad the endless days in Corporameia are behind me now!
Bucky
