At some point, I got tired of writing long, elaborate OOO messages every time I was out of the office for a few days; most of that information should be reusable, and you should only need to change what's changed (updated contact info, etc.).
At the same time, I was also looking for a way to efficiently manage communication while OOO. People should:
- be able to contact me if (and only if) there's a real emergency;
- try some of my alternate contacts in the absence of a real emergency; and
- be able to get in touch with me when I'm back if they really need to talk to me.
Getting all of this text into a single message in a readable way was a bit of a pain. So, I decided to style use the amazing @akiany's JS decision wizard code into a decision tree people could use to decide what to do with me OOO. So now, instead of writing:
Hi, I'm out of the office, but you can contact me here, unless you need to talk to Phil, in which case his phone number is 123-456-7890, but don't call Phil about X, email Janet about X, and her phone number is 987-654-3210, but she's only in on Tuesday, so if it's not Tuesday, email Pat, and I'd be amazed if you're still reading this and even remember why you wanted to email me in the first place etc etc etc
You can just write:
Sorry, I'm out of the office. For more info, see http://danmunz.github.io/ooo/
This site also takes advantage of some great jQuery plugins:
- Backstretch for nice-looking responsive background images
- Scrollto for smooth scrolling and starting the page at the top each time
- DetectMobileBrowsers for when I include some fanicness that isn't supported/appropriate on mobile
- Defines a true 'emergency' and routes people with one to my emergency contact info.
- Provides a clear list of alternate contacts, with e-mail addresses encoded into HTML entities
- Offers download of an ICS file to prompt a visitor to email me when I'm back