4 Years of OOO Bounceback Emails

By: Adam Faughnan

This year, as in all years, we have many reasons to be thankful. To show our gratitude to you, Dear Reader, we will give you a break from our typical thought leadership content and have a bit of fun. This week’s Influencer features highlights from 4 years of OOO replies from Adam Faughnan, our friend, Credit Karma Marketing Capo, and Reigning International Out-Of -Office reply Champion.. Gobble, Gobble… 

1) I have died in a tragic ‘swimming while drunk’ pool accident and my body is quickly decomposing in a cheap coffin in Cabo Airport waiting for the flight home (Southwest allows 2 bags or 1 coffin)

2) I have been murdered. Either by the friends that are accompanying me to Cabo (I know their secrets), my wife (life insurance) or evil birds who have suddenly turned evil (Hitchcock left a lasting impression)

3) I end up being moderately busy on Monday catching up and your email response gets pushed to Tuesday. This probably seems like the most plausible.
Don’t worry. I am still alive. Having barely lost a work weight loss competition by a pound, I am traveling to Ireland where fries are served with every meal. My dad literally eats spaghetti with fries and a few slices of buttered bread once a week. It is a glorious disregard for healthy living for someone who fears death. My sister is getting married in a week and I need to look incredible for wedding pictures after my last sister’s wedding in which I ate my feelings the year before the wedding. And the rest of my siblings lost weight to spite me. They are jealous of my good looks when I am not fat. I will be checking email every 72 hours or so. Well, now I am just lying. I check my email every 15 mins on my phone as my wife and kids will testify. But I only respond to super urgent emails. Unless you can tell me the Irish county I was born in. Then I will respond in minutes. It is nowhere on the Internet so you will have to guess. It is not the most obvious choice so you have a 1 in 10 shot once you rule out the bad accent counties (Cork, Kerry, Galway etc.).

I will be out of the office until Thursday evening at around 4:22pm. So if you send me a follow up email at 4:23pm on Thursday it is likely I will respond. But I promise I will be brutally honest in my reply. So if you send me a cookie cutter sales email that you have sent to 95 other people today it is a guarantee I will make fun of you. If it is super important, email Jay. If you need his email it is jay.lastname@creditkarma.com. His last name is a medieval siege weapon so keep trying until you guess it.
I will leave you with a picture of one of my kids showboating at a playground and the other two working on lifetime grudges towards her.

Dec 24th–  Christmas Eve tradition! Movie and McDonalds. Last Jedi. Hopefully it won’t be a repeat of the Force Awakens where I pick apart the plot holes to a slightly incredulous 5 and 7 year old.
Dec 25th–  French themed Christmas dinner. Champagne, steak and caviar. Actually sounds more like a Republican celebration dinner for tax cuts for billionaires.
Dec 26th– Taking the kids on a road trip! To Garberville. Why Garberville? Not too sure. We were deciding between San Diego and Portland and settled on Garberville. Not even sure if it is a real place.
Dec 27th–  Driving further north to show the kids snow for the first time. They are expecting snowball fights and snowmen. I am expecting whiny moans and shivering after about 235 seconds.
Dec 28th- 30th–  Wrapped in blanket. Sipping wine. Reading books. Crackling fire in the background. We don’t have a working fireplace so will have to download Crackling Fire sounds app.
Dec 31st– New Years Eve! Maintain tradition of being in bed and happily asleep at 9:23pm
Jan 1st- Start planning Q1 media plan.

Here is how I will feel about your email:
Juliet (left): Any cold call Sales/BD email

I will be out of the office until Tuesday Feb 6th. I am going to Boston for my birthday. It was planned well before Tom Brady made his 17th Superbowl (they just call it The Brady Bowl now) but well after Tom Brady left his pregnant girlfriend for a supermodel. So I will have the pleasure of wearing an Eagles jersey underneath a Patriots jersey at a Boston bar. When the Eagles win I plan on tearing the Patriots jersey off like Hulk Hogan, and start flying around the bar like an eagle. So expect me to return to San Francisco looking like my daughter (below). Pretty sure that black eye happened the last time we left her with my in laws so don’t have high expectations. If all my kids are alive coming back I will be happy. If one of them is dead I will be pretty pissed I have to say. Thanksgiving will be awkward af with my relatives.

I will be out of the office until Monday Mar 12th. I will be in New York on business. Like any good comedian, my timing is perfect. My son turned 8 on Tuesday. His birthday party is on Friday. He is is going to a movie with his friends. There will be popcorn. Dinner. Cake. Party bags. It will be the the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Hell and my wife will be doing it solo. By lucky coincidence my father will also be in New York. So I decided to stay an extra night. Pretty sure I will be in purgatory for an extra week thanks to this trip. But I rescued a dying pigeon last week with my kids (90 minute round trip to animal hospital) so it probably evens out. And if God turns out to be a pigeon, I am set for the afterlife. 

I leave you with a picture of me as Han Solo. If it is an emergency call me at 415-###-####. But it better be the equivalent of the Death Star about to obliterate Tatooine in order for you to make that call.

I will be out of the office until Monday Mar 26th. Heading up to Tahoe. Last weekend it took a friend 10 hours to get there. Another slept in his car. The second I hit two consecutive red lights I am turning around. If it is an emergency you are probably emailing the wrong person because I am in Offline Marketing and unless every TV in America has stopped working I am not going to worry about it. And if every TV in America is out, it means the country is done so maybe stop emailing.
I will leave you with a badly timed picture of my youngest child. Heat lamp looks like stripper pole. Ink mark looks like tattoo. And I had paid her $1 for cleaning the kitchen and she stuffed it where she could.

I will be out of the office until Friday, May 5th. My wife is a teacher and has been steadily getting more stressed as the college year winds to an end. My kids are getting more annoying with each passing month (middle child just kicked a ball through my window this morning). So I thought now would be a perfect time to organize a work trip to New York. When I return nothing will be different but I will be four days closer to summer break. See below for last year’s Halloween costume where I force my kids into a group themed costume despite desperate pleas to be a monster or a fairy. “You can choose your own costume when I’m dead’ is a common refrain.
I will be slow in responding to email. You can contact my direct report in my absence. The letters in the full name (random order) are R J A A M Y. The email is first name.lastname@creditkarma.com. If you guess right (one guess only) you may get a response.

I will be out of the office until Monday, May 14th. Although my kids are spoiled, entitled jerks 61% of the time, they are fun enough the rest of the time that I want to spoil them. So I am taking them on a surprise trip to Disneyland! This will probably lead to more entitlement. An Ivy League education. One of them running for President. Me living at the White House. Nuclear war. The melting of the polar ice-caps. 

Based on the picture below my girls are ready for:

a) Disneyland! 

b) A French Revolution themed theme park where Ilse condemns people to death for not letting her on rides because she is too small

I will be out of the office until Wednesday, July 11th. My sister is getting married in Ireland on an island off the coast of Kerry! 

Reasons to be excited

My sister said that while she would like my kids to be flower girls she would prefer me to ditch kids, not to be a parent and go H.A.M. instead. So that was $3,000 saved and don’t have to have three 40 pound sweaty lumps laying on me for 10 hours. 

Despite being happily married I get to talk to my wife for about twelve minutes a day (I play soccer a lot, currently re-watching Friday Night Lights and bathing and putting my kids to sleep is exhausting). Looking forward to some quality time (unless Friday Night Lights is being shown on the plane) with her. 

I have a super tight family (just don’t bring up the family WhatsApp group because my wife is still bitter she was excluded from it) and get to see them again. 

Reasons not to be excited 

Ireland has a 9% chance of good weather in the Summer. When a Faughnan wedding occurs that drops to 2%. 

Small chance one of my kids gets hurt and I am 3,000 miles away when it happens. Also possible my wife and I die in a car accident (roads are terrifying in Ireland) and my three kids become orphans and get shipped to Ireland to live with my sister where a sad shrine to my memory is erected in the kitchen and my mom forces them to say their prayers every day or else I will never get out of purgatory.

The sister who is marrying can be a little bit of a hothead (like me!) and the chances of family drama are moderately high. This might belong in the ‘reasons to be excited’ group as long as it is not me involved (I usually am). 

If you need offline help get in contact with Jay. If you are a salesperson please know I am super cheap. This is my daughter’s face after I insisted she didn’t need a hairdresser and I could do it myself. So keep those CPMs cheap in the proposals. 

Adam

I will be out of the office until Thursday, August 9th. Every year my mother-in-law takes her grandchildren to a beach house in Santa Cruz. Previously there was some worries around one of the kids accidentally dying on her watch (she falls asleep watching movies and my kids like to mess with knives). As you can tell from the below picture, child safety has always been a top concern. But after getting assurances that a child death on her watch would result in her immediate suicide, we are leaving for a quick getaway. 

I will be in Park City, staying with friends. I will be pretty non-responsive. They tend to eat nothing and drink a lot. On my last vacation with them I started eating in secret and it really brought me back to my fat childhood days of stealing chocolate and eating it, locked in a bathroom. If it is really important please text me. Mark and Jay have the number. If you don’t know who Mark and Jay are, then you are already dead to me.   

If you happen to have Park City tips please share them. But if you are a salesperson don’t yelp best places in Park City as a way of getting an in. Because I WILL call you and ask you many follow up questions. And if I don’t believe in my soul that you have been at Park City in your life I will ask for flight confirmation proof to verify. And if you can’t verify you have been there, I am going to post to my Linkedin feed that you are a liar and have deception in your heart. 

Fingers crossed the thin-skinned, small handed monster in charge doesn’t provoke a nuclear war in the next week because I am really looking forward to some down time. 

I will be out of the office until Monday, September 17th. I will be in New York on business. I foolishly booked this trip oblivious of the fact that it is New York fashion week and hotel rooms have mysteriously doubled in price (might be a mystery, might be supply and demand). I am a good corporate soldier (have stayed in bunk beds before to save $20 a night) and it has been challenging to keep the damage down. My only requirements were walking distance to a good pizza place and no visible rats loitering among the garbage outside. The former is easy. The latter means I will likely have to stay in Connecticut. 

If you really need to get a hold of me please text me (415-###-####). Please include your name, title and a story from your childhood that was super embarrassing (I once peed myself in front of friends because I was laughing so hard). I leave you with a picture of my childhood. There is a lot going on here. Why am I wearing an all purple outfit while staring quizzically at my Dad’s receding hairline, knowing that the curse was coming for me too? Why is my older sister wearing that ridiculous top with a nun’s collar? Why is no-one smiling or having a good time? Why did my parents have six kids? If you grew up in Ireland in the 1980s the chances of you having this sponge cake for a birthday was approximately 98.7%. 

…Thank you Adam!  That’s how you do an “Out of Office Reply.”  The fact that you have an internet connection and the power is on is reason enough to be thankful.  

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Love, 

The Influencer!