On my current business trip, with its stops at the CompTIA ChannelCon conference in Phoenix and the D&H Distributing New England show in Boston, I am well and truly OOF. Don’t get me wrong – I mixed in a wee bit of pleasure along the way, visiting MoMA in NYC to look at modern art. It even had geek art!
It was at MoMA that I stumbled upon the OOF painting (pictured) by master artist Edward Ruscha (American, born 1937). While Ruscha has his own interpretation of the OOF as a cartoon strip utterance, I know it as a geek term:
At Microsoft, when someone is out of the office, they typically have an Out-of-Office reply in the Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail system. It’s common to have such an auto-reply say OOF. You can also see the same wandering the hallways of Redmond with little yellow stickies affixed to doors that say OOF.
So what does OOF mean? For that, I searched TechNet and found the following:
“Here's an interesting historical question - when we say Out of Office, why does it sometimes get shortened to ‘OOF’? Shouldn’t it be ‘OOO’?
There’s another meaning for this inside Microsoft, however. ‘OOF’ means not just the message which says you’re Out of Office, but it has grown to encompass the act of being Out of the Office too - so you’ll get people putting sticky notes on their door saying ‘OOF Thurs & Fri’ or even people verbally saying things like, "Oh, Kevin’s OOF on vacation for the rest of the week’. I suppose that sounds better than "Oh, Kevin’s OOO on vacation ..."
OOF was a command used in the days of Microsoft’s Xenix mail system, which set a user as ‘Out of Facility’ – i.e.: Out of the Office. The usage of the term ‘OOF’ just stuck, as did the term ‘Little r’ (e.g. on an email sent to a distribution list, "Who wants to go to the cinema tonight? Little ‘r’ if you’re interested", meaning reply just to me) - as preserved in Outlook with CTRL+R for Reply, and CTRL+SHIFT+R (aka Big R) for Reply All.”
Bottom line. It’s mid-August and time for you to OOF and enjoy a good book, your family and the summer time!
