So, you’re off on your hols, then? Remembered to leave an out-of-office message on your email? Ah, yes. “John Stephens will be out of the office from 1st August for two weeks. If you need an urgent response to a query, please contact … ”

I’m sure you’ll agree that there’s nothing wrong with that – straightforward and informative. But – how can I put this, John? – isn’t it just a little bit prosaic? Don’t you itch to generate a frisson of envy among your colleagues while you’re not hewing at the coalface? Boost your image? What might be called induced OOO envy? If so, you’re going to have to do a damn sight better than the above. Because telling the truth on an OOO is so passé these days. No, what’s required is something altogether more ambitious, more global.

For example, I have an old friend who, so exasperated by one of his friends forever jetting off to Las Vegas to cover another world championship boxing bout, would retaliate with: “Am presently in the Virgin Islands, covering the world windsurfing championships.” The fact that he was down at his local swimming pool with his granddaughter was neither here nor there. After all, your friends can presume too much on your good and forgiving nature, can they not?

But such OOO one-upmanship is strictly in the foothills. And from here on in I feel I must finesse or redact with a heavy censor’s pen to protect the identity of those who otherwise you would laugh your socks off at for being quite so, ahem, up themselves. Take, for example, the following: “For book inquiries, please contact my agent … ”; “For live events, please contact … ”; “For broadcast requests or personal brand inquiries, please contact … ”

This pales into insignificance compared with the following: “Interviews or events, please can you email my publicist …”; “Film/TV projects, please can you email my film/TV agent”; “Books: please can you email my book agent”; “Journalism/essay commissions: I promise I’ll get back to you”; “Sending me a book, well, hey now, I love a good book. Please send to … ”. Pretty ripe stuff, you’ll agree, and surely someone with a sense of their own importance and place in the world.

Telling the truth on an OOO is so passé – what’s required is something altogether more ambitious, more global.

Now, I’m sure that both of the senders of the above are perfectly honourable and upstanding people, though perhaps a smidgen of self-irony wouldn’t have gone amiss. But hey, it’s their lives and was I not suggesting that OOO message leavers should up their game? So no cavils there (well, just a scintilla of one).

But what do you make of someone who, when composing such a message, veers completely off-message, as it were? A little research turned up the following OOO: “Impossible is a big word thrown about by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

Apparently, this is a quote from Muhammad Ali, but quite what it’s doing on an OOO is beyond me. The person who left this is quite unfit for further consideration. In fact, on due reflection, John Stephens’s somewhat terse effort gets my vote.

But, even taking full cognisance of the monumental effort that must have gone into creating such messages as the above, and thanking heaven for the all-too-rare witty message – “I’m having an out of office experience” (full marks for that one), they frankly pale into insignificance when you consider a message that comes long before the advent of email and social media: “Gon out Backson Bisy Backson.” Thank you, Christopher Robin. That, pithily, seems to tick all boxes.