Out of office
On Tuesday, right before I left work in the early afternoon to head over to Grant Park, I sent one of the people from the ALM department a quick email. Then I put up an Out of Office AutoReply on MS Outlook, locked my computer, and left the office. I never used to put up AutoReplies, but my boss has been asking me to do it now that I'm on summer hours and get every other Friday off.
So, trying to make a habit of it, I put up my AutoReply for the day and a half I was to be gone, for the 4th of July. It wasn't even an AutoReply AutoReply. I left no information about when I would be returning to the office. It was just a joke.
A stupid joke that said:
What did one flag say to the other flag? Nothing. It just waved!Have a happy 4th!
Ba dum dum.
Anyway, so, first thing this morning upon my return to work, the IT guy stopped me right outside the elevator and told me that the MS Exchange server had crashed, and that it was my fault. For a nanosecond there, I thought my joke had been so bad that it somehow crashed the email server, but it turns out that the ALM guy that I emailed? He had put up his AutoReply too. So our emails spent the past one and a half days AutoReplying each other, back and forth. Back and forth. AutoReplies AutoReplying to AutoReplies.
En route to 65,000 emails in each of our inboxes.
65,000 emails with subject titles starting with "RE:".
I thought that was pretty damn cool. It was the AutoReply perfect storm.
But obviously for the rest of my coworkers who were without email access for the first hour of this morning, they weren't as amused. It took me having a project-related epiphany right before the lunch hour to finally get back in everybody's good graces again.
I still can't get over how neat and amusing that was, though. How a must-do for bored teenagers is to microwave a CD and see what happens, I believe that something all office dwellers need to try at some point is to play AutoReply ping pong.
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9 Comments
One would think that Outlook would have a limit and/or be smart enough to know when thousands of useless emails are being sent between two accounts like that.
I don't see how that would be amusing at all. Didn't you have to go in and delete all of those emails? That's email hell right there.
That would never happen with Lotus Notes.
We use outlook at the office too, that doesnt happen. I only get one autoresponse from a person if i send them an email. Each following email, I don't get anything. Do I get any work done at the office...no.
Is that what happens? I've thought of that before and always wondered.
That IT guy is full of it. It's totally his fault that happened, not yours.
Yeah, that's what I figure. Something like that occurring seems too stupid and presumably easy to prevent from an admin standpoint.
But hey, nothing's a better substitute for the amusement of temporary mass chaos. :)
Yes, it should only send one auto reply message to each address that it receives a message from.
And Lotus Notes really sucks. Talk about doing stuff backwards.
So, the IT guy couldn't figure it out? Hmmmm....and he's still employed to help you guys with your computers....interesting