I Gave My Out-of-Office Reply a Plot and Now Accounting Won't Stop Emailing Me

Day 1 of my auto-reply said I was at a dentist appointment. Day 9 says the dentist was never real.

The Bit

A guy takes a week off and sets up an AI agent to handle his out-of-office reply. The agent has one instruction: "keep it fresh." Every morning it sends a new version, and every version continues the last one.

It starts as a normal "I'll respond when I'm back." By day three there's a lighthouse. By day five the lighthouse keeper has a brother, and the brother owes someone money. Nobody in the company can tell what is true, and nobody cares, because the reply is better than anything on their streaming queue.

The turn is that people stop emailing him about work. They email him to find out what happens next. Someone from Accounting sends a real invoice question as a cover story and then asks, in the last line, whether the brother is okay.

Why It Works

• The out-of-office message is the most ignored genre of writing at any company. Making it the hottest thing in the building is a clean inversion.
• It pokes at the habit of doing the bare minimum with maximum production value, and at how an agent told to "keep it fresh" has no idea when to stop.
• Everyone has emailed a colleague on leave, gotten the auto-reply, and read it more carefully than they'd admit. The recognition is instant.

Content Treatment

• Primary format: mock product demo with a skit cut-in
• Opening shot: a man in a hammock on an actual beach, phone propped on his chest, reading an email from his boss out loud in a flat voice
• On-screen hook: "my out-of-office has a cliffhanger"
• Escalation: the reply gets a recurring villain, then a flashback, then a reply-all thread where six coworkers argue about the lore
• Button: he returns to work, and the agent sends a new auto-reply to the whole company: "Season 2 begins when he goes on lunch."

Sample Script Beats

1. Man at the airport sets up the agent. "Just make it sound like me." The agent asks if it can make it sound like a version of him with a more interesting life.
2. Day 3 reply, read in a calm voiceover: "I am away from my desk. The lighthouse has gone dark. If this is urgent, you already know what you did."
3. Cut to the office. A coworker whispers to another in a hallway: "Did you see what Dave's reply said today?" A small crowd forms around a monitor.
4. Dave's boss emails him a real deadline. The agent answers with a plot twist and the boss replies, "wait, so is the dentist in on it?"
5. Dave comes back. Nobody asks about his trip. A coworker slides a note across his desk: "Season 2?"

Automation Angle

The agent watches an inbox and a calendar for the leave window. For every inbound email it drafts a reply that references the previous reply, the sender's department, and a running continuity doc it keeps called "the bible." It tracks open plot threads, flags any sender who has emailed more than twice, and promotes them to "recurring character."

The product dashboard reads like enterprise software at its most sincere: Narrative Continuity Score, Engagement Lift, Reader Retention (Week over Week), a toggle labelled "Cliffhanger Intensity," and a red badge that says "3 unresolved arcs." The fake CEO quote: "We didn't set out to disrupt absence. We set out to make it appointment viewing."

Repurposing

• Short video: film only the auto-replies, read deadpan over a stock-footage lighthouse, with coworker reaction cutaways. Under 40 seconds.
• Carousel or thread: one slide or post per day of leave, each showing only the auto-reply text. The final slide is the Accounting email.
• Fake product screenshot: a settings page for "OOO Lore Engine" with the Cliffhanger Intensity slider pushed to maximum and a tooltip warning that coworkers may become invested.

Guardrails

• Satirical concept; not advice.
• Keep any real-world sensitive domains framed as parody.
• Do not include private personal data, real names, or instructions that would harm someone.