Friday, July 14, 2006

OOF for a week

Here is an informal poll: when (if ever) did you start hearing the term OOF to mean "Out of Office"? I first encountered it when I worked at Amazon.com, in 1999. I recall being doubly confused by a coworker's email message: "OOF tomorrow /eom." Both of those acronyms have become more prevalent since then. Except now I generally see eom enclosed in brackets, like this: <eom>.

According to The Microsoft Lexicon, OOF originally stood for "out of facility." I remain curious about when it became commonplace in offices. Or perhaps it's not in yours. Please do leave a comment if you haven't heard this acronym before; I'm curious. Or if you have any OOF-ish thoughts of any sort, please do pipe up.

I myself will be OOF from this blog for the next week, as I'll be on a road trip with family members across the western U.S. See you in a week!

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

nope never heard of OOF...I'm still learning what LOL means! ha!

Anonymous said...

me neither. what's eom?

I do know w/o/e.

Jonathan said...

eom denotes "end of message" -- it's used for subject line-only email messages. Not sure about when it originated, but I'm curious..

Anonymous said...

I'm self-employed, so I'm never OOF, but I didn't know that term either, although I've seen eom. I learn these abbreviations as a matter of survival; when someone uses one I don't know, I search for it online. Have a nice trip in the western U.S. (where I live). Today it's beautiful, so I'm wearing shorts.