The holiday season means email inboxes are filled with out-of-office messages from colleagues who have taken their well-deserved PTO. But one woman wanted to do things a bit differently.
Sharing to TikTok on Nov. 21, Theo Moise asked her followers for their takes on her creative OOO emails, which have been labeled “unprofessional” by her boss.
“I’ve been writing these out-of-office emails and they are like super cute, right?” she begins in the video, which has now been viewed more than 1.8 million times. “At first they were like fun little stories about like adventures involving squirrels and sharks, and they would just be really fun little stories that you can read when I’m not there.”
However, her boss requested she change her OOO email, saying her message was “not funny” and “not professional.” Moise was happy to comply.
“I was like all right cool. So then I changed it and I started making the stories a lot more serious and they had a historical context and they had fun facts and they were just like great elaborate stories,” she continues in the video.
“And he again comes up to me and he’s like, ‘No, they can’t be stories like that, you know, they need to be like professional.’ So I was like okay, so I redid it again and my most recent one is giving wellness tips.”
The latest email, which Moise shared with PEOPLE, details five different methods of mindfulness workers can implement while on the clock, like “desk meditation,” not multitasking and an end-of-day “gratitude check.” After five more tips of what people can do to unwind at the end of a stressful workday, Moise’s email provides details on who to contact while she’s unavailable.
“Tell me why I had another conversation with [my boss] today about how unprofessional that is,” Moise laments in her video. “How is an out-of-office email unprofessional?”
Moise is a catering operations manager at a science museum, and in conversation with PEOPLE she explains the OOO emails were never meant to be disrespectful or unprofessional.
“I sincerely thought it was a missed opportunity to showcase personality,” she says. “I just wanted to be creative and create a spark of joy in people’s mundane 9 to 5. And when a few people gave me positive feedback about it, I thought my intentions worked, now I am not sure if they were being sarcastic about it.”
She explains that she also wasn’t crafting her funny email stories on the clock, but instead using AI to generate them.
A stock image of a black woman looking upset at her computer.
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“I didn’t take company time to write a fable, I just put in a prompt into AI and 15 seconds later, a whole email,” she explains. “It’s very simple and, nowadays, accessible to be unique. I do not fear being different, I fear being forgettable.”
“I just feel like my personality is being smothered by corporate America right now,” she laments in the TikTok.
Of the 11,000 comments on the TikTok video, many of them are in agreement with her boss. TikTok users have suggested she adhere to his guidelines and change her messages to be more succinct.
“Just leave it as a simple OOO email before you’re OOO permanently,” one user comments.
“I have no problem admitting that I made a mistake and misunderstood the assignment,” she says.
In between the public suggestions she tone it down, though, Moise admits that some of the comments on her video have taken it too far.
“The bullying from this has been awful and so many people are wishing me to lose my job, it’s crazy,” she reveals. “Worst of all the amount of people who are saying I am just a personality or a DEI hire, and it’s so rude.”
“I am uniquely qualified, self-accomplished, very educated, and experienced,” she continues. “I am doing so well for my age … I am valuable. It highlights what people truly think about me and people like me in the corporate space.”
In a follow-up video posted on Nov. 26, Moise poked fun at her OOO writing habit, adding in the caption, “All jokes aside, I understand why I shouldnt do this anymore.”
