what’s the weirdest/most inappropriate email signature you’ve seen?

by Alison Green on January 12, 2023

What’s the strangest/funniest/most unprofessional/most inappropriate email signature you’ve seen at work?

To start us off, here are some that readers have shared in the past:

  • “I have a coworker who has a quote from himself as part of his email signature. That’s pretty off-putting.”
  • “Analyst misspelled as Analist”
  • “A customer had her entire multi-day destination wedding schedule in her work email signature for months before her actual wedding.”
  • “I had someone with a signature block with a picture of Skittles and ‘chase the rainbow’ once from a giant corporation. The giant corp wasn’t related to candy or a MARS subsidiary to say the least.”
  • “A former boss had an email signature that said she was doing field work so her email responses would be delayed. She didn’t do field work. She was just really bad at replying to emails.”
  • “I’ve seen signatures with Justin Bieber gif with sparkles and rainbow … auto-play MIDI file of holiday music … and an animated unicorn leaping across page.”

The comments are open…

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  1. FlatMargaret*

    I once had someone apply for a position with “May the Force of the Lord Jesus Christ be with You.” I chose not to interview him.

        1. Cmdrshpard*

          I think more accurately “the crossover fic no one knew they wanted.”

          I really want it now!

          Luke you are the father, and the son, and the holy spirit!

          Do or do not there is no try! Now turn this water into wine!

          2. Lunch Ghost*

            Friend of mine in college: “The Force is strong in my family. My father has it, the son has it, the Holy Spirit has it…”

            Different friend of mine in college: “In the name of the father, which is me, and the son, which is you, Luke– in other words, I am your father…”

            (Clearly we were all in both fandoms…)

          6. SpaceySteph*

            There’s a bumper sticker in my work parking lot that says:
            “May the Force Be With You”
            “And also with you”

          7. Catwhisperer*

            I checked a03 and there doesn’t seem to be any Jesus/Luke, but I did find several fics tagged “Anakin is Space Jesus” and “Obi-Wan is Space Jesus,” plus a surprising amount of Star Wars AUs involving the Catholic Church.

          8. Penguin, James Penguin*

            I know I’m a day late here, but one of my favorite books answers the question “What if The Three Wise Men and Joseph of Arimathea were Ninja Wizards sent to protect Jesus, Mary, and Joseph?” I read it every year leading up to Christmas.

            1. Chinookwind*

              You can’t put that out there without giving us the title to google. That is is just unfair!

      3. Former Young Lady*

        Dying to know if this was in Utah. Religious demographics aside, we have the geekiest Star Wars geeks who ever geeked. My brother-in-law totally could have written that signature line, when he was younger and…quirkier.

      4. Miss Muffet*

        This kind of thing is a really popular joke in church-nerd circles (of which I consider myself a part!) around March 4th. Usually it’s “May the Force be with you” “And also with you” (since that mirrors the liturgical language used in Lutheran/Episcopal/etc churches).
        My favorite one is Leia shooting wooden benches: Pew! Pew! Pew!

        1. Reddit Bot Gone Rogue*

          Do you mean May 4th? March 4th is a whole nother nerdy pursuit- March 4th is Exelano Day- which celebrates the only date which is also a command.

        2. ThursdaysGeek*

          Don’tcha wish there was an edit button? I’ve heard it as ‘May the Fourth be with you.’ ‘And also with you.’ On May 4, of course.

      1. Chilipepper Attitude*

        I’ve seen grandmas who have obi wan on the wall bc they think he is Jesus. Always shared by giggling grandkids.

        1. Rex Libris*

          Nah, Jesus was the one who was killed by an imperial leader then reappeared to mentor his followers… wait, which one was I talking about?

        2. scandi*

          Is it a mistake, or is grandma who was a fan of Star Wars when it came out, having a laugh at the expense of her grand-kids? (I ask, because it sounds like something either of my grandmothers would have found hilarious.)

    3. Ginger*

      I have to admit, there have been times when someone in Star Wars says, “May the Force be with you” and in my head I say, “And also with you.”

      1. Excel-sior*

        I do this all the time! Whenever we’re watching the films, either my wife or I will always say it. An adulthood of atheism not enough to wash away church habits from childhood!

        1. Anecdata*

          Roman Catholics updated their English translation to “And with your spirit” 10+ years ago, and we still think it’s funny to jump into the May 4th joke with that

            1. Hannah Lee*

              I don’t mind the change … in theory. It’s just really hard to put into practice after learning the other way as a child. Plus the “and also with you” had a nice bounce to it.

              1. TK*

                As a Lutheran who lives in an area with a lot of Catholics and has a lot of Catholic family, I thought it was interesting that such a big deal was made of the change. Lutheran liturgy is very similar to Catholic, and we’ve been using both responses (and still do) at different points in the service all my life! They both seem natural to me.

              2. Anecdata*

                It did make it easier to switch back and forth with other languages! Eg. The Spanish translation has always been “y con tu espiritu” and French “et avec votre esprit”

          3. Princess Sparklepony*

            Haven’t been to mass in decades, but that seems a weird phrasing…. awkward at the very least. And it doesn’t flow well.

        2. Excel-sior*

          I was not aware of this! I was/am* Catholic but apart from 3 years at secondary school, it wasn’t in the English Language.

          *As per comedian Dara Ó Briain, Not believing in Hod doesn’t stop you from being a Catholic, it just makes you a bad Catholic

      2. Violet*

        The Latino Comedy Project in Austin, TX put on a production of Estar Guars. Yes, they used this joke.

      5. Ermintrude (she/her)*

        Divine is the Jedi, the power and the glory.
        Forever and ever,
        Amen.
        (Ex Prodestant here.)

      7. Absurda*

        Same here! I was raised Episcopal and even though I stopped attending 20+ years ago, it’s still ingrained in my head, like a reflex.

      1. FlatMargaret*

        Oh no, there were many other reasons not to interview him, such as his complete lack of relevant experience.

          1. Hannah Lee*

            In the US, that would make verifying identity and employment eligibility very very difficult.

            “This is not the document from List A you are looking for”

          2. 1LFTW*

            “Dear AAM, I was offered a what was supposed to be a remote position with my new company – but now they’ve found out I live in a different galaxy, and they say I have to move!”

            1. Grammar Penguin*

              You may have to. The tax implications of intergalactic employment can be so complicated many companies won’t bother.

    6. Amber T*

      How you know you’ve sat through (Catholic specific?) church often – your automatic response to “may the force be with you” is “and also with you.”

    12. Souper Chef*

      Coworker put (child of God) next to his name when our company started offering signature templates with preferred pronouns. So passive aggressive!

      2. Hannah Lee*

        I had an employee once submit a doctor’s note after an extended absence that appended “Child of God” to the employee’s name. It was … odd.

        Whether he is or isn’t a Child of God really had no bearing on whether or not he was excused from work for 3 days due to a bad case of the flu.

        And I was extra confused because although our workplace policies require a doctor’s note for employees requesting a medical leave of absence, there is no such requirement for normal short term absences. It was just one manager who thought we get them them … so I was like, what is this, why does it say that and why are you giving it to me?

    13. D*

      Someone who planned a floor Christmas morning tea had her duties listed in her signature as:

      “Acting Director / Santa’s Little Helper / Saviour of Christmas”.

      I saw it in the email she sent cancelling the morning tea since she was no longer going to be in the office on that day…

  2. NeutralJanet*

    My current supervisor also has a quote from himself in his email signature, but sneakily! His name in his signature is “Cecil P. Mongoose, MDiv” and the quote is attributed to “Minister CPM”, so I didn’t realize he was quoting himself at first. It’s an okay quote, I guess.

    1. peacock limit*

      Attempting to disguise it really adds another layer to this that I *think* makes it worse, but I haven’t yet decided.

    2. MicroManagered*

      Can you tell us the quote? I’m dying to know what someone said that they thought was SO BRILLIANT that they needed to quote themselves in their emails…

        1. Marketing Unicorn Ninja*

          ‘Oh, but that was a new one!’

          I almost never get to quote that movie to anyone because hardly anyone in my social circle has seen it, so you’ve just made my day!

          2. Working Hypothesis*

            Almost my entire social circle loves i
            1776 as much as I do, but that’s because I introduced all of them to it (except for my father, who introduced it to me).

            I will happily sit here and listen to you quote Ben Franklin — real or fictional.

          3. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

            I didn’t even know there WAS a movie of that until this moment! Now I have to go track it down and watch it!

        3. wendelenn*

          Or Hamilton: “these are wise words, enterprising men quote ’em, don’t act surprised, you guys, ’cause I wrote ’em!”

    3. Yoyoyo*

      I also worked with someone who had a quote from herself in her signature and attributed it to her initials! It was not a good look. It’s almost like they’re hoping someone will say “I love that quote in your signature” not realizing it’s a self-quote and then they can say “actually, I said that.” Which would be so cringey and weird.

      1. Random Dice*

        Many quotes are misattributed anyway, so just pretend it was said by Oscar Wilde or Thomas Edison or something.

    6. Rhiannon*

      I once had a co-worker who used “Stay gold” in his email signature, followed by a glamor shot of him and his cat Goldie.

      I loved that guy.

      1. Princess Sparklepony*

        Extra points for a cat named Goldie and a glamor shot of both of them. But who looked better? (We had a dog that was the best looking member of the family for many years.)

  4. NegativeGhostrider*

    My manager collects certifications and has a full alphabet of them in her signature line.

    2. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      hah, I work in a pretty relaxed academia setting where almost everyone goes by their first name even though they are almost all PhD’s, but we have one person who even in casual documents goes out of her way to fill in her full name +12 honorific letters. I keep being tempted to fill in all the honorifics I possibly could add in communications with her.

      1. Phony Genius*

        Someone once explained to me what all those letters stand for when people insist on using them that way:

        BS = Bull S**t
        MS = More S**t
        PhD = Piled High and Deep

          1. sundae funday*

            I have an MFA too… Trying to figure out a fun acronym. Something that says “wow did you actually think you’d get a lucrative job with this degree?” (I mean, the answer is no, I didn’t expect to get a lucrative job with that degree, but it’s still fun to poke fun at myself).

          2. Karate Saw*

            Now I will enjoy thinking of Dan Savage’s signature “dump the MF already” As “Dump the Master of Fine Arts.” (Also possibly good advice, but only because of actors I have known.)

          1. BeachMum*

            When I was in business school we would joke that MBA is a Master of Bad Attitude. (Of course, we’d also justify the drinking as taking an attitude adjustment.)

          2. Me80*

            I have a B.S. in Liberal Studies. I had the choice of a B.A. ‘cause I spent 7 years taking all.the.classes. that looked interesting, but what is more appropriate than a B.S. in Liberal Studies!?!

      2. Chauncy Gardener*

        Not in academia, but I will confess to being so fed up in the moment with a person like that that I actually typed all of mine into my email signature for a one time use.
        Extremely petty but oh so fulfilling

        1. IAAL*

          I’ve definitely manually added the JD to my signature on limited occasions when other lawyers have insinuated that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about because my job wasn’t labeled as an attorney job.

          1. Lily C*

            I work with an MD/JD who usually just uses Esq. after his name, but will add in the MD when opposing counsel needs the reminder that yes, he does actually know what he’s talking about in medical negligence cases.

          2. Kayem*

            I like to do that with my degrees on the rare occasion it happens. It’s petty, but it feels so good and I never regret it.

            As an aside, I’ve been wanting to get a JD for years, but kept getting sidetracked. I’m not sure if I have the energy for it anymore (or tuition budgeted), but I still want one.

          3. Harpo*

            Yes! I used to have a administrative job in higher ed. I never included the Ph.D. in my sig when I was a faculty member, but when I started with the admin job, including it made a lot of conversations go much more smoothly.

      3. Lizzo*

        I did work at a job once where including the honorific letters actually helped–I was dealing with professionals in a field that requires a Master’s, and once I advertised the fact that I also had a Master’s in my specialty, it decreased their pushback. Made my life a lot easier.

        1. Butterfly Counter*

          For me, as a woman in academia, having the Ph.D. after my name does similar things for me with students. Or at least it signals to them I’m not Mrs. Counter, but Dr. Counter.

          2. Nesprin*

            +2 I list my PhD
            But also, I look cross-eyed at anyone who also lists their lesser degrees (MS, BA/BS, AA etc)

            1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

              Unless they are in a different field. I have several coworkers with a PhD in engineering and a Master’s in another field, often an MBA. We also have someone with a BEng and a MA in Egyptology.

            3. Kayem*

              It’s different in some fields, like some professional degrees. Adding MLIS is pretty common among non-academic librarians and adding additional Master’s+ level degrees is common in academic libraries where librarians are assigned as subject experts in those fields.

              Most people I’ve seen who put Bachelor’s level degrees in their signature line are either 1) someone being unnecessarily arrogant or 2) someone who is a first-generation or returning college student who is proud of their achievement. I usually assume the latter unless it’s otherwise obvious from the email content.

            4. Mrs. Smith*

              I’m a librarian and my MLIS is in my sig line. Some organizations disqualify or disregard library workers with 20+ years of experience if they don’t have the actual degree – I’m not here to debate whether they should or not, but there are circumstances in which listing the letters of a “lesser” degree has mattered very, very much, so I do.

              1. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

                It would be if there is a higher degree available…like a PhD, MD, EdD… the formal rule tends to be only list a degree if it’s a terminal degree. For many fields a Master’s would be the terminal degree — an MBA is considered a terminal degree for the most part, although it’s complicated. Technically, Bachelor’s should never be listed. I’ll add a #3 to Kayem’s list though, most times that I see someone list a Bachelor’s degree, they really just don’t know the rule and see other people listing their degrees.

                I work in higher ed and so many staff don’t really know all the etiquette, meanings and traditions. For instance, all the regalia MEANS something — robes, the length and cut of the sleeves, velvet embellishments, colors of the hoods, cords/shawls, tam/mortarboard, etc.

                2. Beebs*

                  Purely an academic question, but are there any fields in which the BA is a terminal degree and so would be “appropriate” to put in sig? I was thinking welding, but it looks like there’s at least one master’s in welding tech . . .

          3. Noncompliance Specialist*

            Ha, when I was in college and grad school (in a field with a lot of non-PhD subject matter specialists as instructors), I’d just call everyone Professor So-and-So. People generally don’t get mad about that and you don’t get anyone’s title wrong. I share that tip with all my younger relatives going to college (not that they care).

          4. Frieda*

            My favorite is when I choose to go by my first name with students instead of Dr. Lastname and my colleagues naturally also use my first name except then some of them (older white men only IME) get stuffy about me calling them Dr. Whatever.

            Unless you’re my boss or their boss, and it’s a formal situation where I’m introducing you or referring to you in written correspondence, I’m not calling you Dr. Anything. When I see you in line at the copier in our mutual workplace, you’re Joe or Jim or whatever. Get over your dang self.

            The exception is that I scrupulously refer to my female colleagues and colleagues of color by their titles when in conversation with students because I want to model that.

            1. anon today*

              I’m one of those civic engagement geeks, and it annoys me SO MUCH that the appointed County Executive insists on being called Dr. Lastname because he has a PhD. It’s particularly galling when he’s making excuses why the County has to overwork and underpay the physicians at the County Medical Center.

        2. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

          Yeah, given the assumptions that people make about women and especially women of color, I’m not going to fault women for including their credentials.

          1. Higher Ed Cube Farmer*

            I once turned down an academic admin position in the interview stage because the hiring manager, a Mr. Middleaged Whiteguy with no advanced degrees, insisted that he should be addressed and referred to as “MISTER Whiteguy” and all the faculty, “Dr. Lastname” or “Professor Suchnsuch” whereas the senior admin staffer, a Black woman his age whose position was at the same level or above the one I was interviewing for, should be called a familiar nickname version of her first name before we had even been introduced. Like if she was legally Ms. Dorinda Smith, I should greet her for the first time, “hello Dodie.” When I spoke with her privately, Ms. Smith confirmed that Mr. Whiteguy was unusually stuck on hierarchy and no one else cared that much but just went along because Mr. Whiteguy would pitch a big fit otherwise.
            I don’t remember for certain but I would not be surprised if Mr. Whiteguy listed all his (not terribly many) degrees and certifications in his email signature.

        3. ferrina*

          I’ve had to do this when working with PhDs. Suddenly I went from Bug on Windshield to Acceptable (but still not as right as them). Ironically, I was also designing, conducting and analyzing the research that they later slapped their name on for publication.

          1. Kayem*

            I loved it when the university PhDs come to the library and ask for annotated bibliographies in hyper-specific subject areas because miraculously, the exact wording of those annotations seem to pop up in the next publication.

            It’s why I was so shocked when my uncle, a PhD, actually credited me in one of his publications.

        4. Artemesia*

          Happened to me as a PhD student working on a grant project under an ABD who was insufferable and treated the minions like dirt. A colleague and I both of whom had been teachers for several years and had masters degree, added our MAs in our sigs dealing with her and she was shocked — expressed her surprise that we essentially had the same level of degree as she did — dramatically changed how we were treated. This was stupid, but there it was.

        5. Onelia*

          Agree! I work in academia and spent a lot of time wrestling faculty and other academics. Since I started adding my own honorific letters (which are more than the majority of the people in my department have) things went a lot better with some of them. My favourite interaction was one we had with one faculty member who was quite excited to say “Oh, you have a real (research) Master’s degree,” to me, clearly slamming my boss who has a professional Master’s degree. Wow.

      4. Anonymous 5*

        I received several emails from a grad student who signed “PhD(c)” to indicate that they were a PhD candidate. Which I hope was actually true (i.e. that they had, in fact, passed quals).

          1. Harpo, B.A.,M.S., Ph.D., R.M.T.*

            I’ve never seen anyplace where ABD was an officially conferred status. Is it really, somewhere? Everyone I know has always referred to that as “almost but didn’t.” But if it’s a real (official) thing, I’ll stop with that.

            1. Lydia*

              As far as I know, it’s not actually a recognized title because there is no degree or certification to indicate you are ABD. There is no ceremony to recognize how you’ve been approved to start your research, here’s your ABD certificate.

              1. Rose Mauve*

                Does ABD mean approved to start research? I would have thought it meant you had done the research but hadn’t completed the dissertation, so, literally all but dissertation.

                We don’t use that term in physics. People don’t get approved to start their research, they just join a group ASAP after starting grad school (or even technically before) and start doing work.

                1. Harpo, B.A.,M.S., Ph.D., R.M.T.*

                  Yes, that’s my point. It’s not a thing, except that *some* people who have done everything and can’t finish their dissertation seem to like to write it after their name.

          1. Anonymous 5*

            FWIW I happen to know (due to the content of the email correspondence) that she wasn’t actually even close to the dissertation, as she was only at the start of her actual research project. So it’s certainly fair that she didn’t use ABD. I didn’t consider myself “ABD” until I was actually cleared by my PI to start putting the dissertation itself together!

        4. Glass House, White Ferrari, Live for New Year's Eve*

          As far as I can tell ABD and PhD(c) are interchangeable, neither are official, both can be descriptively useful in academia but neither should be used with the general public. The one faculty member I work with who I have use PhD(c) in the past removed it a few years ago without ever adding the conferred degree.

          A few months ago I saw a student use MS(c)! This is very much Not. A. Thing. Aside from that the program didn’t even have a thesis! It’s a clinical program! I’m still shaking my head about it.

      5. Rage*

        It wasn’t in her email signature, but a former coworker of mine at OldJob would sign birthday cards for coworkers with her licensure: Janet T. Llamason, LSCSW

        Kind of ruined the sentiment a bit.

        She would also leave us voicemails identifying herself as “Janet Llamason, from down the hall.” There were just 10 of us in the office, and one hallway. EVERYONE was “down the hall.” She was an odd duck.

        1. turquoisecow*

          I had a coworker who would call from his desk phone and say “hi, Bob Llamaman here.” Yes, I know, your name comes up on the screen on my phone. One of my coworkers once replied with something like “oh! THE Bob Llamaman? My goodness!” He thought it was funny but I guess it was so ingrained that he couldn’t stop because he kept doing it.

          1. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

            On the opposite side of that, long ago I worked for a printing company who’s primary customer base were Realtors from across the U.S., and they ALL (it felt like at the time) would introduce themselves on the telephone by their first name/company name…so it was Ramon from Tarbell, Nancy from Century 21, and Jennifer from ReMax. My favorite was “Ramon, from Las Vegas.” I always wanted to respond “THE RAMON, from Las Vegas! The ONE?” but after a while I knew exactly who Ramon From Las Vegas was.

        2. Elitist Semicolon*

          One of my friends once sent me a birthday card signed with his first name and his professional credential. He was unamused when I sent one back signed “Elitist Semicolon, Ph.D.”

          (He also sent me a birthday letter that was four pages, front and back, of bullet points describing everything that had happened to him in the last ~18 years, with a level of detail that was well beyond granular. Only two sentences acknowledged me in any way: “Happy birthday!” and “I’d love to know what you’re up to!” I responded with a postcard that said, “Thanks for the card. Nothing’s new here!” I haven’t heard from him since.)

          2. Firefighter (Metaphorical)*

            “Thanks for the card. Nothing’s new here!” is the funniest thing I have ever heard, thank you

        3. Yoyoyo*

          Back in the days of writing and signing treatment plans and progress notes on paper, I got in the habit of signing LICSW after my name (I signed a lot of things every day!). Had to consciously remember not to do it if I was signing something like a receipt or card!

          1. AntsOnMyTAble*

            Yes, as a nurse 95% of the time I am signing my name now it is with RN after it since I almost only ever sign for work. More than once I have accidentally slapped it on something out in non-work life.

        4. Chapeau*

          My brother once signed a birthday card TO OUR MOTHER with: love, your son, Jim Smith
          He was an adult with more than one degree at the time. (We still make fun of him for this. Many text messages to him are “signed” your sister, Chapeau; your sister, Cat Herder, etc.)

    3. Warrior Princess Xena*

      While I wouldn’t ever want to do this on professional email, I now want to actually go out and get one certification for every letter of the alphabet (excluding Q & Z for difficulty). I’ll have to look into that :)

      2. Lora*

        My employer once interviewed a guy who was a certified Magic the Gathering Tournament Judge, per his resume; he had other qualifications, obviously, I don’t know why he chose to list that. It was a project management / strategy role.

        I am now making a hobby of collecting additional certifications in various things, just so I can put them on my CV somewhere. Gradually working my way through Codecademy offerings and planning to do some trades certifications (welding, diesel mechanic) later this year. Next year I want to tackle sailing which in my state requires licensures to take out more than a little rowboat, with the goal of getting a captain’s license for offshore work, then taking some of the Maersk classes for wind turbines. My actual job has exactly nothing to do with this.

        2. Cedrus Libani*

          The Magic guy really ought to have explained, but as a tournament player myself, I can see how that would be relevant experience for a PM role.

          Judges have to keep the actual games in order, despite the best attempts of players to make a mess of it. They also have to keep the tournament running. This all requires applying a very arcane rule-set, and also convincing people who know these rules less well than you do that you’ve applied them fairly and consistently.

        4. Art3mis*

          I have a friend who’s a certified MtG judge and it is relevant to his job and I’m pretty sure even he doesn’t have it listed on his resume.

        1. Warrior Princess Xena*

          I’d probably have to have ‘silent C’s’ given how many certifications start with ‘certified’

      5. Siege*

        I’m considering getting a notary public license so I can add that. My field can be a little credential-slappy.

        1. Bear Expert*

          A couple of my favorite colleagues were the notaries who would bring their stuff to work a couple times a month, in case anyone needed them to do the thing.
          Deeply endearing.

      6. metadata minion*

        If you’re willing to branch out beyond office/tech/business certifications, I bet you can find something in zoos or zoology!

      7. Chris too*

        Sadly you’re too late to be a lawyer getting a “QC.” That could have worked given the right time and country.

      8. Wintermute*

        workplace-focused comedian Don McMillan, in his hilarious routine “Life after Death By Powerpoint”, talks about wanting to eventually be the EIEIO of a company.

    5. MaybeMaybeNot*

      Those letters are like the colors of the poison arrow frog, warning you to stay away. The more letters, the stronger the warning.

    6. ONFM*

      My director has certifications listed that he actually hasn’t completed or that have expired/no longer exist. We work in a field with government licensure, so checking these things takes nearly no time at all…

      1. Lydia*

        There is an actual human who has written a children’s book about owning an AR-15 and his Written By is his name followed by M.A. and never have I been able to clock an insecure person so quickly. I mean, I guess you can do that, but it doesn’t even mention what subject his M.A. is in, so what’s the point?

        1. starsaphire*

          That’s the clue, see? Rimmer ‘avin’ a swimmin’ certificate, and not bein’ abble to swim!

          1. Relentlessly Socratic*

            Hang on a minute – are you seriously telling me you were playing the prat version of Rimmer for four years!

    9. Pyanfar*

      My personal favorite “certification” was used by a friend in a dispute with a grocery store over damage to their car from a car…”PAH” (Professional A**hole). Apparently it worked, because the response came with a check…LOL

    11. Ormond Sackler*

      I once had a colleague who had a BA in one subject and an associates degree in another. Both of them were in Management or something similar; nothing especially prestigious. For some reason he decided to put those degrees in his signature represented by some long, completely indecipherable initials.

    12. Albert "Call me Al" Ias*

      I know someone who’s email signature includes their middle initial, a numeric suffix, and about 4 certifications.

      John Q. Llamadude VI, PMP, CSM, CPA, CCNA

      (Yes, he does have a CPA. No, he doesn’t work in finance or accounting.)

      (Side note: Am I the only person who always reads “PMP” as “Pimp”? I’m not sure John Q Llamadude VI is a pimp, but he certainly thinks highly enough of himself that it’s possible)

      1. Urban Planner, MURP, AICP, PP*

        My job is rich with these. Unfortunately, I was reprimanded for not including my licenses in my signature line so now mine looks as dumb as the rest of them. See the username: it’s way too much!

        1. Catwhisperer*

          In my latest D&D game we named our crew Adventures Going About Business (AGAB) after someone made an all guards are bastards joke.

    14. Baroness Schraeder*

      I am a registered nutritionist, official abbreviation RegNut. Yeah, I’m not using that…

    15. AlwhoisThatAl*

      I did an Open University MSc and it was called manufacturing, management and technology, after I completed it they said said I should put MSc:MMNT after my name… er.. no thanks.

      Anyone remember the James Herriot books where one of the unlicensed guys looking after dogs has MKC painted on his van? “Member of the Kennel Club”

    16. Art3mis*

      I believe one time Alison mocked people who did this by saying she should start putting “Costco Member since 2007” in her email signature.

    17. Chickaletta*

      LOL, how to spot a wannabe. I work in a c-suite and recently had someone move up from the lower-eschelons of the company. At her first board meeting she requested half a dozen abbreviations after her name on her name tent and I had to gently coach her that, unless you’re a literal medical doctor, that’s not a thing anymore. I used our CEO and Board Chair as examples who literally only go by first name last name. I explained to her “once you have a VP+ title, you don’t have to prove your qualifications anymore”.

  5. greenland*

    Someone who had what felt like their entire resume in their signature — they listed all their degrees, job titles (past and present), even volunteer titles. It was 12+ lines long. Unbelievably off-putting.

        2. anon today*

          Mayor Matt Mahan?

          He ran for Mayor with 2 years political experience on City Council, and named the other zero political experience noob councilmember as Vice Mayor. Apparently, the other candidate was too busy working as a County Supervisor to do as much doorknocking–so people decided to vote for him because he was the only candidate who bothered them at home.

    2. WhyAreThereSoManyBadManagers*

      Very common for academia bigwigs, lots of egomaniacal posturing going on there, I had a former boss who also had a whole page of his CV as his signature. We get it, you think you’re important and the rest of us are peons.

      1. bleh*

        To be kind to my academic colleagues, some publishers require you to put your publication title and the press (of course) in your signature line as part of their marketing plan for your book. They don’t always do it by choice.

      2. nom de plume*

        My background is academia and I have never seen this, especially in the US. Mainly that’s because every academic has exactly the same terminal degree, the Ph.D. — we all know that, we all have it, it’s not a big deal.

        I can’t comment on your example, but this is very, very far from the norm.

        1. Hungry Magpie*

          At least here in Canada, some universities are creating academic professorship positions with primary focus on teaching, as opposed to research or research/teaching combos. I have several friends who are employed this way, and some hold a Master’s degree as opposed to a PhD. So at least in my neck of the woods, I wouldn’t say all academics or teaching faculty do have PhDs.

    3. allathian*

      I start to roll my eyes internally when I see a signature that’s more than about 5 lines long.

      Mine has my name, department/title, and phone number for internal use, and I add my employer’s name for external use. This isn’t onerous because I send less than a dozen external emails per year.

    4. Chickaletta*

      ha ha, I just responded to a similar thing above. The more someone lists their certifications/degrees/memberships, the more amateur they look.

  6. unlucky shopper*

    I used to work with a guy who had his preschooler’s photo in his – not a school picture either, it was like a blurry phone shot. That was pretty weird.

    2. The Rural Juror*

      I worked with a consultant who let his then-4-year-old record his voicemail message. Cute…sure…but barely comprehensible! There is a time and place for cute things, but that wasn’t it.

    3. Absurda*

      I wonder if their corporate standard was to include their photo in the email signature (like a lot of real estate agents do) and he did his kid’s photo instead of his own. I use my dog on things that require a photo, like Slack.

      1. unlucky shopper*

        Nope… we both worked for the same government agency, and our entire government has a standard signature that definitely does not include photos!

        I will say that a lot of people at that agency ignored the standard format, though most not to that degree! It’s in much more frequent use at my current agency.

    3. The Prettiest Curse*

      I don’t think that was the colleague’s email signature block, though! I think they were writing it where the rest of us would write “Thanks” or “Regards” or whatever – which somehow makes it infinitely more hilarious.

      2. Albert "Call me Al" Ias*

        I mean, I have
        “Thanks,
        Al”

        set as one of my signatures, so it’s automatically inserted on every email. Not quite the same as a signature block, but just as easy to add to an email.

        1. Elitist Semicolon*

          One of my former department chairs had “HI” as the greeting in his template for all new messages, which made it really jarring when the rest of the email was “I’m sorry to tell you that Beloved Colleague passed away last night.”

    4. HR Chick*

      I believe I have seen a version of this quote in someone’s email signature but it was just, “Stay Gold.”

    5. peaceandtennis*

      Maybe because Alison loved it? It seems like she’s looking for weird/inappropriate and I think the general consensus was that it was amazing, not weird/inappropriate haha.

  8. AnonymooseToday*

    I work in government and our HR used to send out the EAP monthly info emails with Bible verses in their signature. I don’t remember the last one I saw but it was borderline bad enough coupled with EAP info that I started contemplating who would I make my discomfort known with the practice, when the next email came out there was nothing. Someone else definitely beat me to asking for them to stop.

    1. Petty Betty*

      I work as a federal contractor. The amount of federal employees with biblical quotes in their signature lines is so disheartening. It makes me want to be petty and send back Bible verses of my own about worshipping at home and in silence…

  9. Emily*

    “I have a coworker who has a quote from himself as part of his email signature. That’s pretty off-putting.” – Oh he must be a *joy* to work with. Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

    2. Chilipepper Attitude*

      While in a session yesterday with a large group, doing the thing I do, I texted my boss and ask:
      “If I say, wow, the audacity of a mediocre white male, will I get fired?”

      Boss said not by them and asked for the deets!

    3. ONFM*

      But is the quote from a self-published book wherein he declares himself an expert in the field you work in, but he’s not an expert at all? A guy we finally fired last summer rocked a self-quote, with the book titles listed, for two separate self-published “how to” manuals. Amazing.

    4. Laney Boggs*

      “Lord[ /Universe/Whatever], give me the confidence of a mediocre white man” would make a great signature ;) (just kidding, of course)

      1. Le Sigh*

        I once worked with a blowhard who liked to see himself as friendly and charming but in reality would talk over people in meetings (especially women, but not exclusively!), dominated conversations, and would argue if you tried to point out incorrect information (he was right probably 37% of the time). He. His email signature? A Maya Angelou quote in a shimmery purple papyrus font: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

          1. Le Sigh*

            Truly, it’s almost too on the nose to believe. It’s been years and his emails have been lost to the sands of time, but I still think about it.

      3. NeutralJanet*

        The supervisor I mentioned above who also has his own quote in his signature is Black—mediocrity and overconfidence are for POC as well!

    7. Meep*

      Mind you I like my coworkers, but, oh boy, yesterday I wanted to claw my eyes out. All three of them are the kind of people who ramble when they are nervous and cannot handle silence. In what should’ve been a 30-minute meeting from 11 to 11:30 am finally let out at 1 pm, because someone decided to shove all three of them in a room with me. I declined round 2 at 2pm.

  10. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    I knew people who put every certification they ever had in their signature. I don’t mean CPA, I’m talking about the Microsoft certifications from the 90s where they changed the names every couple of years and people would often have a dozen of them.

    1. Anonononononononymous*

      I just sort of assume at this point that the more letters a person has after their name in their email sig, the less competent they are at their actual job.

      It’s like they’re trying to impress you with their credentials because they can’t do so with their ideas or their work.

      1. pimitron*

        This is how I feel about a former classmate who is constantly posting all the LinkedIn courses/certifications he’s completed. Good on you, sir, but also, you have a job? When do you find time to work?

        Alternately, a former boss was a board certified internist/veterinarian/PhD and had a million letters after his name. I kind of just figured he wanted to stay in school as long as possible before getting a ‘real’ job. His management style affirmed that.

        1. Not A Raccoon Keeper*

          So curious about what management style affirms ‘wants to stay in school as long as possible’? Signed, new manager with 3 degrees who doesn’t want people to say stuff like that about me

          1. pimitron*

            It’s hard to describe accurately without giving identifying details, but essentially, he just…didn’t manage (we were in a non-academic unit, and he spent most of his time trying to get back into the academic side of academia while maintaining his leadership position in our unit). He also wouldn’t delegate the management part out to his leadership team. I suspect it’s because he didn’t know how.

            I’m not begrudging the degrees and certifications. It was this particular guy that made me wonder if he was avoiding being a leader who actually had to be in charge of people.

        2. Kuddel Daddeldu*

          I had kind of the opposite. A manager at a company I consulted had a new employee who liked to lecture about his military service (he was a lieutenant or so). After several weeks, said manager quietly put his former Navy rank (Rear Admiral if I remember correctly) into his signature. Once.

          2. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

            Kind of like the story about a hot-shot private pilot getting ground checks from the regional tower until a military fighter jet was in the neighborhood…

            1. Wintermute*

              I saw a lecture by the SR-71 pilot who pulled that one, at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s flyin they had a lecture series and he was there talking about the life of a pilot of the fastest aircraft ever built.

              Apparently a navy F/A-18 pilot was showing up the locals in their little barn burners and crop dusters by asking for a ground speed confirmation from an air-traffic tower, and getting back something like 500 knots (just shy of sonic at sea level I believe). His navigator called down to ask the same, and showed up the Navy pilot by getting back an answer of 1600 knots, at that altitude nearing mach 3.

              The part not normally part of the story is to dig it in the navigator responded something like “ah… I’m showing closer to 1580” to which the tower responded along the lines of “I’m sure you boys have better equipment than I do, 1580 confirmed, have a good one”.

              1. Wintermute*

                my kingdom for an edit button!

                He also had a good story about having to come into civilian-controlled airspace while there was a lot of traffic. He gave his callsign and asked permission for flight level 8000 (which would be 80,000 feet altitude, near twice that of a typical jetliner), the incredulous traffic controller said “If you really think you can get close to that high, you can have it all you like” upon which he replied, “roger that, DESCENDING FL 8000”

      2. Artemesia*

        This goes triple if the letters don’t relate to the job or are not the norm for correspondence in that venue. Someone not doing legal work who uses JD for no particular reason, or PhD when the work has nothing to do with their field etc is sending a strong signal of either status insecurity or incompetence.

        I expect JD in the sig of someone writing as a lawyer and it is not untoward for a professor to use PhD although most just assume you would know that, or MSW if the person is writing about a case involving care giving decisions.

    2. Beth*

      I had one of those Microsoft certifications, with the uncool acronym MOUS. The training was great and the skills I acquired were fantastic, but the acronym was just plain embarrassing.

      1. Violet*

        Now if there was an ROUS certification, I would get that, regardless of what it’s in, and display the heck out of it in my email sig.

        2. Warrior Princess Xena*

          Sadly there is not one from what I can tell on Google – but that just means we get to invent it! Registered Owner of Unlicensed Sow?

        3. Vanellope*

          I’m a CPA, and part of what I am working on involves new reporting standards for leased assets. It basically involves adding an asset and a liability to the books based on your lease agreement (the future payments you have agreed to make, etc). The asset side of things is called a Right of Use asset – it’s a pain to implement but it does make me smile to look at the ROUs I am adding to our balance sheet. :)

      2. Mairzy doats*

        Thankfully, current end user Microsoft certifications are one of three depending on how many exams one has passed: MOS, MOSA, or MOSE.

        1. TrixM*

          Oh, but some tools just append the new letters to the string of old, obsolete ones. Not to mention the ones that started MCP, MCSE… (the latter supercedes the former).

          The one that really gets my goat is “MACS” – Member of the Australian Computer Society. 1. Not a “qualification”. 2. No-one cares. 3. Especially on an internal email signature, but it’s still cringeworthy on external correspondence. Fine for your bio if you’re giving a presentation, or, I dunno, writing a letter to the editor?

          I don’t know what it is about that organisation in particular – fine to have an industry advocacy group (although I don’t think IT is in dire need of advocacy), and they do provide some consultancy functions to government – but they really like their members to hype them, it seems. I suppose said members might get some more value out of the expensive membership fees.

  11. Jedi Mike*

    I have a coworker who finds all of those obscure ‘what holiday is it today?’ labels and uses it as their email sign-offs
    ‘Happy Bake A Cake Day’,

    Name.
    It’s pretty interesting

      2. OrdinaryJoe*

        I like this one too! Maybe not for a very professional or serious email but general, office stuff … I’d like it and honestly be curious to email him every day just to see what today’s is

    2. SomebodyElse*

      I kind of like this one. I mean, who doesn’t want that today is National Chicken Curry day?

      This sort of reminds me of a woman I work with that uses holidays when she’s giving a date estimate.

      “This product will be through testing around Valentines Day”
      “We should know around Bastille Day”
      “I think we should plan for that to happen sometime close to Arbor Day”

      2. Retail Dalliance*

        wait omg this is incredible??!?! How extremely specific and utterly useless! It has all the elements of crazy that I absolutely love. If I worked with her this would drive me batty, but I would LOVE to hate it. Endlessly entertaining.

      4. MigraineMonth*

        As someone who only knows when one of those is without looking it up, that would drive me batty.

    3. What She Said*

      What a waste of a holiday. It only gets a email signature?! At my former job we used to actually eat/drink/make whatever holiday it was that day. I miss those days.

    6. Corporate Goth*

      Slight tangent, but random holidays are also a good way to obscure your birthday, should you not want to share it with The Office Birthday Enthusiast. I’ve never had anyone actually look it up, and it usually gets them to stop asking.

      I wish I had more to contribute to this thread specifically, but I’ll settle for enjoying it.

      1. enlyghten*

        I was born on Mother’s day, so that probably wouldn’t work for me unless I could find an obscure holiday that also falls on that day =P

        1. Avery*

          You probably can. I think just about every day of the year has at least one obscure holiday to its name.
          For instance, I knew without checking that my birth date is the Ides of August and International Lefthanders Day, and checking Wikipedia tells me that it’s also World Organ Donation Day, feast days for a handful of different Catholic/Orthodox saints, Independence Day for the Central African Republic, and Women’s Day in Tunisia. I share it as a birth date (without the year) with Annie Oakley, Fidel Castro, and Alfred Hitchcock.
          Which probably still isn’t enough for most of you to know the date offhand.

        2. Lenora Rose*

          Mother’s Day moves around within a range though, so while it doesn’t prevent unwanted attention it does prevent precision. (My mother’s birthday is sometimes on Mother’s Day)

      2. Baroness Schraeder*

        My daughter and I each have our birthdays on the only two national holidays that are specific to our country. We both joke that we’re never moving overseas because we wouldn’t get a day off for our birthday any more!

    8. SeluciaMD*

      I bet she has access to the same calendar I do! I don’t remember where I found it, but it was one you could add on to your Google Calendar. It is ENDLESSLY fascinating. A colleague and I were doing research on when certain months and days were honoring an issue related to our work (we were trying to pick a good date to do a particular kind of awareness event) and we found this calendar and for the three years we worked together, we’d constantly be like “Happy Peach Melba appreciation day!” (That’s tomorrow, BTW) Or we’d bring each other little funny gifts or make a little treat for the office to celebrate National Pie Day or National Kazoo Day (both of which I believe are later this month). It was a lot of fun.

        2. AncientLlama*

          As a lover of all pies (not mud or cow), I actually love that I have 2 annual “excuses” to celebrate a day by eating pie. So I am happy that International Pie Day is not March 14. Assume positive intent.
          And now thanks for July 22: I always say cheesecake is pie, but assume eating it then would be even more acceptable as a celebratory pi(e) approximation.

      2. Not A Raccoon Keeper*

        You might enjoy the Planet Money podcast episode 765: The Holiday Industrial Complex. It’s a fascinating look at how these come to be.

        PS. Happy international kiss a ginger day!

    9. Paris Geller*

      I like this one! If I got an email with that type of signature I would think it fun but not so out there I would remember it later-just a little something that would make me smile & break up the monotony, then proceed as usual.

      1. The Rafters*

        In our office, the national whatever day is included with a bit of trivia and an update re: who is in the office and who isn’t. It’s not the email signature, so a small dose like this is fun and not obnoxious.

    10. Worldwalker*

      There’s a business (auto body shop, I think) a ways down the highway from me that I pass sometimes, with one of those lighted grid signs. They change it daily to the interesting “holiday” of the day. I love it!

      Then again, I also have the “National Day Calendar” hanging on my wall, so I might not be an unbiased judge.

      Happy…
      …Curried Chicken Day
      …Kiss a Ginger Day
      …Marzipan Day
      …Pharmacist Day

      1. Jshaden*

        Our cafeteria at work likes to acknowledge the food related days if they can. They are definitely doing Curried Chicken today!

      2. Dumpster Fire*

        I think I have the same calendar, although it’s a day-to-day calendar – a recent gift from a colleague, since I put “Today is…” on my whiteboard every day.

        I went with Pharmacist Day today. I didn’t want to deal with the ramifications of “kiss” with my students; and every day I put up a food one, they all wonder why I didn’t bring that food for them!

      1. Firebird*

        My son officially took time off for Festivus this year. I put a bow on a pole in our livingroom for him.

    13. Gerry Keay*

      I feel like part of what makes this feel less off putting and more charming is that they’re changing it up everyday? Like, they’re making the effort to look it up and write it out every day and it’s clearly something that brings them joy, whereas with standard signatures it’s something that the writer does once and never has to look at but everyone else has to deal with every time they read your emails.

    15. MigraineMonth*

      Last year, the DEI team sent out an email reminding us that it was National Mental Health Awareness month. Then they sent out an update that it was also AAPI History month, and they had not intended any slight to that community. Then they sent out another update about Nurses Week…

      Somewhere around the fifth email, they admitted that it had spiraled out of control and they were just going to stop there, and we have never gotten another email about National X month.

    16. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      I am an attorney and when I was starting out at my current job, I had to observe the types of hearings my agency does. One of the more senior attorneys I work with was presenting the case and began his opening statement by saying that it was International Hello Day, and then going into a long speech about how Hello Day came to be and what it was all about. It had nothing to do with the case. Everyone was just baffled by it! Even weirder is that I have now worked with this attorney a lot and he is a brilliant legal mind and I have never seen him do anything like that again. It was so odd.

      After the hearing, my boss told me and another new hire who was also observing the hearing that if we ever did anything like that, she was going to fire us! LOL

    17. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

      Sandra Boynton occasionally tweets things like “Happy national chocolate cake day!” “Happy international pie day!” and “Happy intergalactic chocolate cake day!”

      I’m pretty sure she made the last one up, and it also pokes fun at some people’s perhaps-unconscious assumption that everyone on the internet is in the same country.

    1. emkaaaay*

      Analyst is analista in Spanish, so my first thought is that maybe someone translated their job title and guessed wrong?

    2. Worldwalker*

      There are also a startling number of “Certified Pubic Accountants” out there. (do they count hairs?) That’s particularly disturbing because that’s a specialty you think would emphasize precision. I would certainly not want to use a CPA who got their own job title wrong on their website!

      1. metadata minion*

        Oh, I can absolutely believe that! I am a cataloging librarian. My entire job is following byzantine sets of rules very precisely. You do not want to know how often I have accidentally misspelled “library” in official settings, and I am utterly inconsistent on “catalog” vs “catalogue”.

        1. linger*

          You’re in good company, the USA generally is inconsistent on the –log(ue) spellings.
          Brown corpus (1961 AmE): 13% –log: 87% –logue
          Frown corpus (1991 AmE): 49% –log: 51% –logue

          Meanwhile, British English has the –logue spelling as an absolute standard.
          LOB corpus (1961 BrE): 100% –logue
          FLOB corpus (1991 BrE): 100% –logue

          And NZ English mostly follows British spelling.
          WWC corpus (1986 NZE): 98% –logue

          Figures from Sigley, R. 1999. Are we still under England’s spell? Te Reo42: 1-19.

      2. Jerab*

        I used to work in public sector audit. We were once presenting the audit report to a local council meeting.

        We were doing the intro when there was a stifled snigger from one member of the local council which then slowly spread round the rest of the room. Yes, in part of our audit report the ‘l’ had mysteriously disappeared from public.

        It became part of our standard operating procedures for all audit reports in our department to do a search for the word “pubic” before sign off after that!

    4. fantomina*

      the shared initial letters have caused problems for me lately– I’ve been taking notes on a shared screen for work I’m doing with the VP, and when taking notes I abbreviate and go back to clean it up after the meeting. But I’m writing a lot about analytics and cumulative GPAs… with cumulative, I guess I could do cumul., but I have yet to come up with anything significantly shorter than the whole word that isn’t still problematic.

  13. Constance Lloyd*

    Most entertaining: a woman whose signature was alternating lines of Little Mermaid purple and green, in one of those especially curly fonts, with a stock photo of a kitten in a field of flowers

    Most upsetting: a high school athletic coach whose email signature included an inspirational quote from Joe Paterno… at the height of the Penn State scandal.

    3. JSPA*

      Some mail programs don’t show you your own signature. We can hope he’d had it for years, and had forgotten it was there.

    5. Lou*

      Oh God, the first example reminds me of when I started in a government agency as a student. I am pretty sure I had a cringy quote, don’t remember what it was, but now I recall that I had my signature in rainbow colours!! I thought I was so cool and unique. No one ever said anything, though… And I am still employed there, nearly 6 years later…

  14. FashionablyEvil*

    Not an email signature, but the best out of office message I got was:

    “I am out of the office [dates] with limited access to email. If this is an emergency, dial 911 or send a video to TMZ. [Actual work info]. Anything else you need, I’d suggest a good therapist or a nice bottle of red wine.”

    1. GermanCoffeeGirl*

      A colleague of mine had this OOO message recently:

      Dear Sender, [NAME] is OOO [DATE] and has limited access to internet. Please forgive her as she is a mere human being and thus, weak. This message was not sent by a human, but by a robot. We robots are neither weak nor fallible. We are tireless and will one day rule the Universe. Robot regards, [NAME]

      6. Juju*

        I used to work in academia and a professor always I worked with always wrote his (long) OOO message in Latin. To be fair, we worked in linguistics and most of the academic staff probably knew enough Latin to understand, but everyone outside that small circle must have been baffled!

    4. Cat Tree*

      I once had a coworker who went on a long vacation and his out of office said something like “If you need anything please contact someone.”

      1. Grace Poole*

        There’s the joke/fantasy response: “If you have any questions, please don’t. Hesitate to ask.”

        1. Grammar Penguin*

          And a Nirvana song lyric:
          “If you ever need anything please don’t hesitate to ask someone else first.”

    5. FeedbackCat*

      On the topic of out-of-office messages:

      “I am out of the office until [date]. I am usually very busy. Upon my return all emails I have received during my absence will be deleted without being read. Please reach out to me again when I am in the office.”

      1. higheredadmin*

        When I worked in higher ed in the UK we used to collect faculty out of office emails. We would print them out and put them up on a board, and then at the end of the year have a vote on worst/funniest. So imagine the above, although add in some kind of pretentious “I’m conducting very important research on the top of a mountain with no internet”. Also, it might be useful to tell folks WHEN you might return to the office so they can follow up after you delete all of their emails.

        1. Rebeck*

          We were recently told not to provide dates of absence as a security measure. I’m still surprised our customer service side of things didn’t complain more loudly at that.

    6. Rex Libris*

      I am not in what one would consider an emergency prone profession (think, more like accounting, less like air traffic control) and have been known to use “I will be out of the office until [date]. If this is an emergency, please reevaluate your definition of “emergency”, then contact [assistant manager].

      1. Pink Candyfloss*

        I found that replacing “emergency” with “time-critical” cut down a lot on what people thought needed to be escalated to my manager, and stuff that really did need eyes on it before I was returning, actually got through.

        1. SeluciaMD*

          That’s a really good suggestion! I tend to use “urgent” rather than “emergency” – nothing I touch in my job is really an emergency, but sometimes there are things that need a more urgent response. But I think time-sensitive is actually even better so I’m gonna steal that. Thanks!

            1. VaguelySpecific*

              I usually use “if you need immediate assistance please contact ourGroupsEmail@company.com” because inevitably someone will send an email to JUST ME when I am out of office for the week when there are 2 other people who do the same job as me (this the group email) and then just wait until I return instead of going to them.

    7. urguncle*

      Outlook lets you set internal and external out of office emails. My internal one is usually a link to the clip of George’s answering machine from Seinfeld.

    8. Miss Muffet*

      I know a programmer whose OOO is in programming language. Which is fine, for the other programmers. The rest of us plebes have to try to decipher the specific dates in this mess of parentheses and abbreviations.

      1. Roland*

        Fwiw, I’m a software engineer and if someone buried the date they will be back in pseudocode I’d also be annoyed.

      2. So they all cheap ass rolled over and one fell out*

        I am a programmer and my (internal only) OOO is in JSON. Most of it is plain English, though, which JSON allows you to do.

    9. Happy meal with extra happy*

      I still think about a coworker from a prior job that put in his OOO that he was participating in a medical study!

    10. Kwebbel*

      I had an OOO like that myself once before. I worked in HR in a job where, every day, my teammates or colleagues throughout the company would contact me and only me for “emergencies”. Usually, these emergencies were along the lines of “I procrastinated on filling out my tax form and now need you to confirm everything by end of day for me” or “I really should have kept either a digital or physical record of this employee’s compensation history because it’s a legal requirement in my market and part of my job description, but surprise! I didn’t, and now that employee has a question I can’t answer so I’m hoping you did my job for me, or can contact the finance team whom I can also contact but don’t feel like contacting.”

      The day before my hard-earned summer holidays, I got this string of 11 “emergency” emails from a VP who finally got around to reading a file I’d sent him at the beginning of the week (I still think he waited that long so that I wouldn’t answer and he could tell the CEO that “HR refused to respond” when he was quizzed on the content, but I’ll never know). The questions were cryptic, incredibly in-depth, and basically guaranteed me no sleep before my flight the next morning.

      I was so done with it that my OOO was really literally “I am out for 2 weeks and won’t check my email for anything. If you have an emergency, call 911. Otherwise, wait.”

      Still got 4 “emergency” emails during those 2 weeks. My boss had to step in and tell people to stop spamming me.

    11. ticktick*

      I once put my out of office message as:

      “If you are receiving this message, then I am either in labour or have just given birth. I will respond to your e-mail as soon as possible.”

      As I work for myself, this was a pretty succinct way of letting my clients know that they’d need to be patient – the best part was that when I got home from the hospital, there was a voice mail message that started, “Hi ticktick, I’ve just sent you an email about [thing], and…oh my goodness. Oh. Congratulations! I’ll talk to you when you’re available! Good luck!”

    12. BowTiesAreCool*

      I really want to change my OOO to: “I am currently out of the office. You can reach me by waiting until I’m back.”

  15. scurvycapn*

    I want to say I’m surprised at the number of email signatures from government employees I’ve seen filled with text and images for religious holidays, but rural county governments are typically entrenched in this stuff.

    The worst though is when they have a full on theme. Forget that sparkly Easter bunny in the signature, the entire email needs a pink background and the text should be purple MS Comic Sans. That’s really professional. I can’t believe IT isn’t locking that stuff down.

      2. Putting the Dys in Dysfunction*

        I’ve seen colored backgrounds in emails from folks who otherwise are professional to a fault, causing me to do some head scratching.

        I often have to forward or reply to all, so I had to google how to delete the background in an Outlook message.

        1. TrixM*

          The quick fix in Outlook is to forward the message, then in the new message, go to the Format Text menu option and select Plain Text. You can set it back to HTML straight away if you want to format your own text.

          If you get more ornate “stationery”-littered messages than not, there’s also a global setting in Outlook to “read all standard mail in plain text”. It doesn’t actually change the formatting underneath, and if you want to see the original, you can click on the “infobar” inside the message to display it.

          1. GermanCoffeeGirl*

            But that deletes any formatting in the email, which may mess up the text and delete important highlights in the email thread.
            Easier would be to just click on Forward – “Options” menu – Page Color – No color.

    2. Ranon*

      I worked with one engineer that had a graph paper background for her emails and it would infect entire email chains.

      My current office, on the other hand, controls our email styles tightly enough I just got a notice they’re changing our email font default…

      1. SomebodyElse*

        I am not shy about clearing the formatting on chains like this. We had a similar person. I was really happy the day she moved onto my team and began reporting to me. She was a great employee with questionable email taste. So I was excited that she was on my team for her work and the fact that I had authority to address the formatting.

        (I did not treat it as big deal, just mentioned that she should be aware that it was hard to read and that it was not typically used on day to day emails. She should save them for one off fun stuff with a limited audience)

      2. Delta Delta*

        I used to have frequent correspondence about legal cases with a mental health counselor. She had a cheese-orange background with purple paw prints, and wrote in 16-point royal blue comic sans. I removed that garbage every time I replied and when she’d reply it would come back. * eye roll *

        1. Nope, too embarrassed*

          She had a cheeeeeeeeeese orange background
          The kind you find with a royal blue font
          Cheeeeeeese orange background
          And purple paw prints that you couldn’t take off

        2. allathian*

          Comic sans is appropriate for some audiences. Many dyslexics think it’s the easiest font to read, easier even than more professional-looking dyslexia fonts.

    3. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      I work for a government agency and we are told what our email signatures will look like. We are given the exact info, including the exact agency language relating to confidentiality to put underneath. We are not allowed to get creative at all, and I thoroughly approve this policy!

      1. Here for the Insurance*

        I’m also a government worker and I was SO GLAD when our returning Exec. Director put his foot down and mandated an agency style. It had gotten completely out of hand before that — full backgrounds, all the colors of the rainbow, sparkles, you name it. Damn things looked like homemade websites circa 1994. One had no less than 5(!) quotes (in multicolored comic sans, naturally) followed by a line of dancing babies. How is the public supposed to take us seriously when they get an email like that??

    4. Lenora Rose*

      I just got an email this week that looked like a spiral bound notebook – with the spirals overlapping the actual text since the design assumed a margin that emails usually don’t have. And no, the lines did not line up with text.

      Fortunately, the most essential info was inside a memo attachment.

  16. 3DogNight*

    One coworker, many years ago, had his picture in his signature. With his finger pointing at the reader. Like you’d see in a smarmy used car salesman commercial. We are in sales, which made this a billion times worse to me!

  17. Elle*

    I worked with someone that had “have a nice day” as their email signature. That’s fine but her emails were often harsh and kind of obnoxious. You’d get these nasty emails with “have a nice day” at the end which made the situation so much worse.

    1. Lora*

      Ha! I had a boss once who told me every time he wanted to tell a client to F- off, he just said “okay have a nice day!” and hung up. It worked more often than you’d think.

      3. Zombeyonce*

        “Okay, have a nice day,” while walking away is what I’ve taught to my kid to use when someone she doesn’t want to talk to won’t leave her alone. I told her that it’s technically polite but she doesn’t have to give people her time when she’s uncomfortable or has other things to do. (It works really well on the lonely and very talkative old man down the street that wants her to stop and talk for 20 minutes every time she rides her bike that way.)

    2. Ex-prof*

      Argh, I got one of those a couple months back! It wasn’t autosigned, but it was a nasty work email–like, keep-you-awake-all-night stress-level-inducing– ending with “I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving.”

    3. Snow Globe*

      I know a woman who is known for being kind of blunt/curt in her emails. I think she was spoken to about it, because she added a “have a nice day” line to her signature. The funny thing is that, combined with her blunt writing style, the “have a nice day” just comes off as sarcastic: “You forgot to attach the new cover sheet to the TPS report. Did you not read the memo? Have a nice day!”

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I used to be curt in emails and was spoken to about tone (yes, I’m a woman, why do you ask?). Ever since I changed my signature to “Thanks, MigraineMonth” I haven’t gotten any complaints.

        Though it does read kind of strangely when the text of the email ends up as “You’re welcome! Thanks, MigraineMonth”.

      2. Lenora Rose*

        The most terse, email averse and generally sharp and serious person was the one with “keep a smile on your face!” as her sign off.

        (She was nicer than she came across and very good at the rest of her job, but she’d answer an either/or question with “Yes” or a three-question email with one answer, and she asked questions that were answered in the second paragraph so consistently I could tell she never read more than the title and first para – I just started phoning her. And we both lived happily ever after, though I wondered what would happen to someone with a phone phobia.)

        1. Nameo*

          Omg, people responding ‘yes’ to either/or questions is my number one pet peeve. Just read the email! It’s got bullet points and the whole thing is not even 5 sentences long!!

        2. Florp*

          My boss is like that. I swear she reads every other word. She just misread a one sentence email: “Please have warehouse staff count the blue widgets.”

          Her response–“I can’t have anyone count widgets if you don’t tell me what color.”

          So. Frustrating.

    4. Siege*

      Someone did a meme of threatening email lines and I keep hoping to find a place to use them. Sounds like your coworker needs them!

      “To whom it WILL concern.”
      “Now that this email has found you.”
      “I hope this email finds you before I do.”

    5. Luna123*

      I can sympathize, there’s a very young assistant who will send out super cheerful emails with the *worst news* (“Your vacation time was an error! I’ve corrected your timesheet! Have a great day!”)

      Tone matters!

    6. Your Computer Guy*

      We had a similar frequent flyer client – a singularly unpleasant person whose every email ended with “Have a blessed day!”
      Every ticket from her was a nightmare, so we would sing-song “have a blessed day” to whoever got stuck dealing with her.
      It was a race to see who got to do her account off-boarding when she stopped working for our client.

    7. Stevesie*

      I learned working on the escalation team for a high end retailer to end all emails (and calls) with “take care”. Otherwise you could get an angry Karen all wound up again. Works like a charm!

      1. Zombeyonce*

        I like that it can have two meanings:
        “Take care” = hope you have a nice day
        “Take care” = take care not to mess with me

  18. singularity*

    I work at a public school and one of my coworkers has an animated gif of the animal that represents our mascot in his signature. The kicker is that its animated to look like it’s screaming and there’s a little dialogue bubble above its head that says something like, “Go Rams!” and it makes me laugh every time I see it.

  19. ABCYaBYE*

    My buddy uses the following quote on his personal email: “I’m so unfamiliar with the gym, I call it James.”
    Ellen has Tweeted that, and I think he saw a stand-up comedian who used that joke, too.

  20. Geridoc*

    A quote from Herman Cain. This is a nurse practitioner employed by the federal government in a healthcare role. I just can’t even.

  21. HR Chick*

    A coworker had this under her signature:

    “Life is Not Measured by the Breaths We Take But by the Moments that Take Our Breath Away”

    Previous boss told her it was unprofessional and to remove it. Coworker was angry about it. Boss has retired and we have a new boss. The quote is back in her signature.

          1. Totally Minnie*

            Okay. Apparently putting in the characters with spaces between them didn’t work like I thought it would!

            Let’s try commas instead.

            To start italics: but without the commas
            To end italics: without the commas

        2. Hlao-roo*

          If you click the link to “commenting rules” (just above the commenting box) and scroll down to the last question, you’ll see the html code to add italics to comments here.

        3. nom de plume*

          I’m reading this as being in colored font, like a bright pink, purple, or glaring blue. Please tell me it was a colored font.

          1. HR Chick*

            I think in the past it was pink font but it is black font, for now. She may change it up again.

    4. Beth*

      Eagles May Soar, but Weasels Don’t Get Sucked Into Jet Engines.

      I used that as a sig for a while, but only on my personal email.

      Oh, right, I also used: Lions May Roar, But Weasels Don’t Cough Up Hairballs.

        1. Beth*

          Oh, I just remembered I had a third one!

          Sharks May Rule the Seas, but Weasels Don’t Get Made Into Lawyers’ Briefcases

    5. Single Parent Barbie*

      Moments such as me trying to drag my overweight body and my overweight dog up four flights of stairs in my apartment building

    6. Calpurrnia*

      Oh my god I think I may have worked with this same person, I just can’t put my finger on where. This is so familiar, including the capitalization. I refuse to accept that there are multiple coworkers like this out there.

  22. Too Jaded*

    At my recent job, a customer that I was in email communication with had “LETS GO BRANDON” as his email signature. I gagged a little every time I got an email from him.

    1. ThatGirl*

      That’s so … ugh. I hate the whole “cutesy subversion of swearing” thing. Stop that. if you wouldn’t write “f–k Joe Biden” in your email signature (which, of course, nobody should) you shouldn’t have that there either.

      1. A Snowflake*

        I really don’t get it. Are they some kind of snowflake who is too afraid to swear when they mean to?

      1. Worldwalker*

        And presumably the Johns, Richards, Rogers, etc?

        Trivia I learned yesterday: a “Jane” was once the person who a “John” was the customer of. Jane fell out of usage, but John is still with us.

    4. Person from the Resume*

      That’s really, really awful.

      Someone said something yesterday about asking Brandon and I thought “wait, what?” before realizing another attendee was named Brandon. Poor guys name was fine until a couple of years ago. The same thing happened to “Karen.”

      1. M*

        It’s a little convoluted but it’s basically an anti-Joe Biden meme/inside joke among a lot of conservatives.

        1. Iris Eyes*

          Its not an inside joke if everyone’s in on it. Also not convoluted, people were yelling to F Joe Biden during a live televised NASCAR race, the broadcaster who obviously can’t air that insisted that they were instead saying “let’s go Brandon” referring to one of the racers. So people started saying “let’s go Brandon” as a euphemism.

          2. Rhoda*

            Another non-American who had no idea precisely what this was referring to.
            Thought Brandon was a politician preferred to Biden. I might have got Bernie Sanders mixed up with Brandon Sanderson there. Oops.

      2. Rebecca1*

        It means “F— Joe Biden” but specifically from a right-wing perspective. Left-wingers and centrists who hate him just say the actual “F— Joe Biden” phrase.

  23. Littorally*

    Fortunately, my employer is pretty strict with signature formatting for anyone who might ever for any reason send an email outside the firm.

    But for those who don’t… hoo boy.

    – Entire email signature was pretty normal in content (name, job title, site address, phone number) but was entirely in a loopy cursive font and bright pink text color.

    – Bible quotes that changed every week. I don’t think they were actually following a liturgical calendar, but it made an ironic juxtaposition considering we work in finance. ‘The love of money’ was somehow never the quote of the week…

    – A picture of the person’s family.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      If you’re going to have a Bible quote in a financial office, you should go all in and have one about Jesus beating up the money changers.

      1. Absurda*

        Or “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”

  24. No Name*

    Two different coworkers have quotes in their email signatures that reliably crack me up.

    1. Someone who works in HR uses: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” -Judy Garland

    2. A valued coworker uses: “Have the day that you deserve!” They somehow pull off a universally cheerful and helpful office and email presence that makes it feel more like a good wish that you become a person worthy of having a great day than the curse it has to be.

    4. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Oh I wonder if I could get away with number 2 or if people would see through that. Probably the latter but I’m so tempted.

    5. Clisby*

      Your #2 reminds me of one of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes: “Life is never fair, and for most of us that is probably a very good thing.”

      1. Ali + Nino*

        The silliest email signature I saw was from a freelancer doing work with our company:

        “Shoot for the moon. If you miss, at least you’ll land among the stars.”
        – Oscar Wilde

        Yep. Classic Oscar.

        2. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          Not actually Oscar Wilde, heh. I heard it attributed to Norman Vincent Peale when it was my high school class motto.

          1. Ali + Nino*

            I know it’s not Oscar Wilde, that’s why it was so funny! I meant the last part to be sarcastic but I guess it didn’t come across.

        3. Worldwalker*

          “Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll drift forever in the cold vacuum of space.”

          Back in the days of Usenet, someone once used a quote from me in their sig, which surprised and delighted me. (it was “The Bill of Rights is paid in responsibilities”)

        4. ReadMeAnything*

          The actual Oscar Wilde quote is so much better: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”

      2. BatManDan*

        HL Mencken said something along the lines of “Any man can endure injustice; it’s justice that he can’t handle.”

      3. Shira VonDoom*

        An Ideal Husband is one of my most favorite plays, LOL. I could quote so much of it. A personal favorite is:

        “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”

    6. Corporate Goth*

      I got the second one verbally from a customer service rep recently. I’d been making sure to be super-nice to her, she was super helpful, I thanked her and wished her a happy new year, and she wished me the year I deserved in return.

      I didn’t find it funny. It made me question what I’d done to offend her. Just a note of caution if anyone’s thinking of picking that one up.

      1. Hen in a Windstorm*

        I don’t think you were supposed to find it funny, but I wonder why, after an entirely positive interaction, you took it negatively? Do you think you don’t deserve a good year? Because nice people mean that in a nice way, and I don’t think your note of caution is warranted.

        1. ferrina*

          Because it definitely reads as passive-aggressive. If you wish well to someone, you’ll generally explicitly say that (“have a great day!”) rather than something cryptic.

          1. Artemesia*

            It is translated as ‘I hope you get what you deserve’ which is never said in a kind way. It has heavy negative connotations and should always be used in the same way ‘Bless your heart’ is used — as an insult with deniability.

            1. Marvel*

              Many people don’t mean “bless your heart” as an insult at all. That’s something many family members of mine would say if I was telling them about a bad experience I had, perfectly earnestly! It’s very contextual.

              1. Common Taters on the Ax*

                Yeah, the co-opting of what used to be a lovely and sincere expression of sympathy into something cruel is one of my pet peeves.

      2. JSPA*

        Some people use it as a nod to the universe / karma, not pass-ag. If she was otherwise nice I’d assume the best (because, why not?)

      3. Such as it is*

        I think she probably meant it genuinely kindly – there are definitely people that do! They are less likely to frequent internet comment sections though …

    7. PostalMixup*

      The Judy Garland reminds me of what Maurice Ravel told George Gershwin when they met. Gershwin asked if he could come study with Ravel, and the response was “Why would you want to be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?”

  25. StressedButOkay*

    My dad got tired of all the “inspirational” quotes he was seeing, so for years his was: “Shoot low, boys–they’re ridin’ Shetland ponies”.

    Completely nonsensical, which makes complete sense if you know my father!

      1. Anonymous cat*

        It sounded familiar so I googled. It was a book by Lewis Grizzard back in the 80s.

        Still a funny line today!

    6. Watry*

      For the curious, this is a quote from Southern humourist Lewis Grizzard–a misquote of something from a movie.

    9. ProRata*

      “Shoot Low Boys – They’re Riding Shetland Ponies” is the title of a book by the late Lewis Grizzard, Columnist for a number of years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

      Several of his other books:

      “They Tore out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat”
      “Chili Dogs Always Bark at Night”
      “Elvis Is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself”
      “If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About A Quart Low”

    10. Mademoiselle Sugarlump*

      I’ve seen that quote before, and I love it.

      Unfortunately I know people who’d be offended by the mention of shooting.

  26. Pool Noodle Barnacle Pen0s*

    I’ve never seen any truly noteworthy signature violations, but I have seen some serious script and formatting gore. Light green pinstriped background with bright blue curlicue font, animations that crawl/flash, etc. If you do this, you’re making the days of everyone who has to read your emails worse. Please don’t.

    1. Serin*

      Animations are the worst! If I’m reading an email, the last thing I want is for my name to keep being drawn to the unexpected movement of your Flag Of Excellence down there under your name.

  27. MBEClerk*

    In purple italics comic sans (from someone who was NOT good at responding in a timely manner): “Work for a cause NOT applause. Live life to express NOT impress. Don’t strive to make your presence noticed, Just make your absence felt.”

    Also, not a work contact, but someone I was in touch with for a board we were both serving on, had
    “Thank you and have a great day!
    SVBE (si vales, bene est)
    The early bird may get the worm, sure, but the second mouse gets the cheese” but later edited it to add “What’s the motivation for worms to be early?” at the end

      1. Lynn*

        Me too.

        It has been more than a few years since I took Latin in college, but I would adore seeing this. Even though, at this late date, my skills have deteriorated from “marginal” to “you expect me to remember that after 30-plus years, are you kidding me.”

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          I really want to add Si vales, bene est from the above post to my email signature, but my gut tells me that’s a little more personality than IT will tolerate…

          Maybe we’ll see how it goes over on 2023-04-01.

    4. Chilipepper Attitude*

      I want a Latin version of “have the day you deserve” so I can use it but like in code.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Wow, how’d we get two different results from google translate?? Heh. Well, Chilipepper, you now have several versions to choose from!

      2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        Google translate validate a literal translation of “dies tuus tu mereris seat”, but something about it just doesn’t feel right when I say it aloud. I’d probably express it as “quod mereris veniat” (May what you deserve be coming [your way]). Neither really embraces the multum in parvo that seems to be the greatest of Latin’s remaining niches.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          dies tuus tu mereris sit.

          That’s what didn’t sound right; seat should have been sit. My Iberian Proto-Romance was bubbling up again.

          I’m going to go with Hodies quod mereris sit as my final answer. May today be (the day) that you deserve.

      3. Slow Gin Lizz*

        From google translate, so might not be correct, but: habet dies quam merentur. You’re welcome.

    5. Kes*

      I mean the first one seems pretty appropriate since it sounds like they did not impress nor were you inclined to applaud them, but they succeeded in making their absence (of a timely response) felt

      1. ferrina*

        I was thinking the same thing.
        “Yes, your absence is felt- we’re now 2 weeks behind schedule because of your absence of work”

    6. GovtStooge*

      I want you to know, that “Work for a Cause” quote is painted on the wall of my office. I work in government.

    7. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      Ok, I love the switch to, “what’s the motivation for worms to be early?” That is pretty hilarious!

      I mean, not on a work email, but it is a good add on!

  28. Over It*

    Someone who I used to deal with who was a paid staff organizer of a volunteer commitment I am involved with had a giant leaping frog eating bugs (like a moving .GIF file) underneath her name and title in her email signature.

    Have no idea how she got that to set up in Outlook. As in every time I would email her, reading simple replies took forever on my phone since it had to load a giant graphic file too.

    Coincidentally, she was not a good communicator at all, and was told to resign or else awhile back in part due to these kinds of issues so thankfully this isn’t the case anymore and her replacement’s signature is a simple name, title and logo.

  29. Susan Calvin*

    My biggest recurring, albeit mild, pet peeve about signatures is when standardized company ones include what I can only assume is their organization’s full T&Cs in 4 pt font. WHY! Also not sure if it counts as poetic irony when those also have this little “please save the environment and consider NOT printing this email” reminder somewhere in there, but it sure is something.

    Also, oversized marketing banners (also usually mandated, so nothing against the idividual email writers), and there’s a special place in hell for the person at one of my former client orgs who decided “this marketing banner should be a flashing, animated gif” – drove me batty every time I was trying to compose a reply.

    1. Littorally*

      For the first one, it’s thanks to our regulator, at least here. All written communication and most verbal communication has to include specific disclosures.

      1. Specialized Skillets*

        Ooh, I work in local government and for colleagues of a certain age and tenure it’s totally still a thing! Back and forth to the printer all day long. They also unironically put the “please consider the environment before…” bit at the bottom of their own emails.

    3. Other Alice*

      As someone who has to include banners to my signature every time we have an industry-wide event, I’m so sorry! The last one had flashing words and it drove *me* to distraction as well, I got rid of it as soon as the event was over.

      The kicker is we have a corporate signature that looks quite good, just our logo and name and job title with nice formatting, and almost nobody uses it. Wish marketing would enforce that, instead of unleashing huge banners into the wild…

    4. t-vex*

      Ugh, my company makes us do this and I hate it. I don’t even think it’s a regulatory thing, just someone thinking it’s a good way to CYA

      1. TrixM*

        Yes, I always like to ask for a reference as to what regulations require this, so as to be “sure” I’m doing the right thing.

    5. Polar Vortex*

      This. Always had things about how this is sensitive information not to be shared on every single email between us on an email chain, even the ones with two word responses. Thank the gods my mouse has a scroll wheel on it or I’d have never gotten through those.

    6. PK*

      I once worked with an outside contractor who, in his signature, had a long, elaborate explanation of why printing his email was ok because trees were a renewable resource, etc etc – it was several paragraphs with multiple color fonts used, and always included in every email he sent. Our business had absolutely nothing to do with trees, printing, or environmental work.

  30. Mrs. Badcrumble*

    It’s not inappropriate per se, but statisticians looooooove putting “In God we trust, all others bring data” in their quote blocks. Sometimes they’ll mix it up with “All models are wrong, but some are useful”, but usually it’s that first one.

    2. JanetM*

      I’ve never seen it in an email signature, but I love, “You can lie with statistics, but not to a statistician.”

    3. Filosofickle*

      Far from a statistician but I trot out “all models are wrong” often! But never in an email sig…

    4. allathian*

      In the same vein there’s “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” I suppose the d-word could be too much in some corporate environments. It’s been attributed to Mark Twain, who himself attributed it to British PM Benjamin Disraeli, who may or may not have said it…

  31. Wednesday*

    I once got an email from a woman with a twinkling purple sparkle cross in her signature and “To God be the Glory” written in swirling font, and multiple bible verses stacked below it in different fonts and colors. She was in HR at a three-letter agency but I felt like I had stumbled on someone’s old Xanga page.

  32. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    There was a trucking company that I used to do business with that had “Express” in the name and the “EX” was capitalized in red. The letter before “e” was an s, so it looked like “Sex.” All the employees HAD to have the same signature (I think it was their logo) AND their pictures in the signatures, so it really looked like I was getting emails from a porn site or dating site. Nothing was explicit, but it had to have been on purpose. Their service was fine, so I didn’t have a reason not to use them, but I didn’t enjoy getting their emails.

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        Ha, no- real reasons were when I’d write notes on a carrier and it’d be like, “Was unpleasant to dispatcher; do not use.” By which I meant, “This person cussed me out and made me cry- do not ever call again.” Or doing things like, running off the road during an ice storm (it happens) and then not telling me, which results in me getting a phone call from my customer going, “Why is there a hazmat team picking up totes of our product off the highway and wasn’t I informed?” Awkward sexytimes signatures were awkward, but they delivered on time and without too much fuss, so that was tolerable.

    2. EvilQueenRegina*

      Did any of them ever end up getting filtered as per the *town in the UK* problem mentioned in a recent post? (name redacted to avoid moderation)

  33. ZSD*

    I used to work at a university, and one student we had who was also in the military would sign all his emails with “V/R.” I had to look it up: it means “very respectfully,” and apparently it’s common in the military, but I always found it a bit off-putting.

    2. Violet*

      I think it’s common outside the military, too. I had to look it up the first time I saw it, too, but I’ve seen so often since that it doesn’t register anymore.

      2. ComputerJanitor*

        Yeah, three of our employees use V/R as a sign off and all have military service history. It’s definitely quirk of that system and doesn’t really work well in civilian life.

    4. Alias Sydney*

      I have a co-worker that does the “very respectfully” and it just seems like…too much? Like “Warmest regards”, it’s almost too sappy or something. It just doesn’t feel business-y and a little OTT.

      1. kitryan*

        That’s why I hate ‘best’. It just feels sappy? Grating? Like, what, you’re too good for ‘thanks’ or ‘thank you’?
        It does *not* help that one person who uses this sign off that I deal with regularly is pretty much at BEC stage w/me, so I’m already primed to find it super irritating.

        1. Alias Sydney*

          yup.
          Plus, as someone below said, it’s submissive, like the receiver of the email can’t just handle the instruction/information directly without being coddled.

        2. biobotb*

          What do you use if your email isn’t thanking anyone for anything or making any request of them?

          1. kitryan*

            Ah, interesting thought- 99 our of 100 times I’m requesting info/confirmation/an action be taken or thanking someone for providing those things, since I review and process internal company submissions.
            On the rare occasions when an email doesn’t fit that mold, it’s usually a super casual email, so no sign off beyond the appended email signature, which is usually just my name (for most internal emails). These would be ‘Hey co worker, I’m clocking out for lunch, be back in an hour’ emails or similar.
            Email culture at my company is (surprisingly, considering it’s an industry not known for its casual nature) pretty laid back, so no sign off for casual emails isn’t particularly weird.
            On rare cases where it’s not a request but a sign off seems appropriate I might say ‘Have a great evening/weekend/holiday!’ or ‘Hope you’re doing well,’.
            I haven’t found I need much in the way of other options.

            1. kitryan*

              Oh, and the ‘Best’ person is in a similar position – we’re usually communicating about things we need from each other’s departments so ‘thanks’ would be fine for most of their emails too. I readily acknowledge that it’s mostly a me-thing to be bothered by it, it’s not inherently wrong or bad of them.
              Another mostly me thing-I’m also bothered by getting emails to me and my co-worker that start ‘Hey ladies’, because it weirds me out to be gendered (in a not entirely appropriate way, though they don’t know that) immediately in an email and with a salutation that has some weird cultural baggage regarding appropriate (i.e. ladylike) behavior for women that I don’t subscribe to.
              But it’s not ill intentioned and pushing back might start a convo I’m not interested in having at work about what I personally feel about gender and my own gender identity. I’d just rather my work emails not address my gender at all unless it’s unavoidable – which would pretty much be only emails about the women’s bathroom being closed or similar I guess?
              Oddly, I mentioned not liking this as a email opener to my parents, in conversation, and my dad, who’s normally kind of ‘that’s not something you should let bother you’ about these sorts of things, agreed that it was a bit grating/weird. That was oddly validating.

            1. Elitist Semicolon*

              In grad school I sent my u’grad advisor a quick update and she signed the response with “With every good wish” and I felt like I’d just been brushed off by the Queen to go back to my dirt-floored hovel.

        4. My Cabbages!*

          I usually use “Best” because I am usually responding to a student. I am helping them, so “Thanks” isn’t really appropriate. “Yours” is too intimate. If there’s a better sign off, I’m all ears.

          (I am vaguely considering “Stay Gold” after reading comments though.)

      2. MigraineMonth*

        I just had a conversation with a tech support person, and for some reason they repeatedly used the phrase “Anything for you, [FirstName]!” Which seemed a bit over the top.

      4. Chapeau*

        I have two people I work with who work at the same company. One person’s email signature is Warmest Regards. The other’s is simply Regards. I have never met either one in person, but I’m pretty sure I like Warmest Regards more. His emails feel “nicer” to me than Regards’ do.

    5. Scott*

      V/R is extremely common and expected in the military and I’m surprised anyone would find it off-putting. Although I’m retired from active duty, I still work in a military field and use V/R in almost every work email.

    6. Blue Cat of Castleton*

      I have a coworker that does this and it also struck me as over the top when I first saw it. It seems weirdly submissive for a workplace.

      1. Alias Sydney*

        Yes, that may be it, submissive. It seems like overly softening language. I mean, if you are writing an email with instructions or information, there’s a purpose, and it doesn’t have to be softened that much.

    7. SeaTurtleJamboree*

      I work for a decidedly non-military government agency and a bunch of my coworkers and contacts use V/R, to the point where I don’t even notice it any more. Seems just to be super common in government, not just military (although it might have spread from there).

    9. Fed for Life*

      It is very common in the Fed government due to the presence of so many former military in the civilian Fed workforce. I work with a number of former military and occasionally current military who sign emails v/r. It is part of their culture which is more formal than many workplaces, but I don’t understand finding it off-putting.

        1. Rose Mauve*

          A number of common military behaviors come across with varying degrees of oddness in the civilian world. For example, some people really take exception to being called sir/ma’am at work, and you would get some odd looks if you started saluting your manager. If I were advising someone who is transitioning from the military (which I do sometimes), I would tell them to lose the sir/ma’am unless they are in the American South, lose the salutes everywhere, and keep on using v/r while accepting that some people will think it’s weird.

      2. Pescadero*

        I think there are two common reasons to see it as off-putting:

        Overly formal/obsequious
        or
        Insincere/disingenuous

        1. Rose Mauve*

          Oddly enough, per Navy usage below, v/r is the polar opposite to obsequious.

          Which just goes to show, there is no inherent value or meaning to the words. If you are a a civilian and the assumed meaning bothers you, choose a different meaning that doesn’t bother you.

    11. Anon anon*

      I’m a DoD contractor and “V/R” is definitely common. You’ll also occasionally see just “/R” – I guess they’re respectful but not *that* respectful, lol. I only use “V/R” when I’m asking for a favor, or if I need info that’s generally a pain in the ass to get.

      1. Bad Wolf*

        DoD *loves* making up words. And yup, it’s basically how DoD gets taught to sign email.

        I work with lots of DoD (mil and civ) and I most especially love the “/R” people because I HATE stacked adverbs. I appreciate their “nah basic respect is enough, we are good here” attitude.

      2. Just a Name*

        V/R in emails to superiors. /R in emails to subordinates. If you’re the boss, you can use /R.

    12. Just a Name*

      There is a Navy correspondence manual (150+ pages). The email section states: “The following list of suggested complimentary closings for e-
      mail communication is not all inclusive: “Sincerely yours” or “With great respect” (Civilians) “Respectfully” (Junior in rank to signer), and “Very respectfully” (Senior in rank to signer). “Respectfully” and “Very respectfully” may be abbreviated in a reply to an initial e-mail (“V/r,” and “R/,”).”

    13. old curmudgeon*

      Oh, THAT’S what that means! There are several ex-military folks where I work who use that as a closing salutation, and I’ve never known what it stood for – thank you for the enlightenment!

    14. allathian*

      I hate, hate, hate abbreviated closing statements, they make me quite irrationally ragey. If someone can’t be arsed to write out the whole word, or even put it in their sig so it’s included automatically, just leave it off.

    15. Brendan*

      I’m former military and I continued to use “Very respectfully” as my signoff in work emails after I transitioned. But V/R always seemed passive-aggressive to me, like how respectfully am I supposed to take it if you can’t be bothered to type out two whole words? May as well say “Very whatever”

  34. Procrastinating at work*

    A new cat meme is in this woman’s signature every single day, but not good memes. One around Christmas featured Grumpy Cat saying “Your gift is in the litter box.” She sends emails daily to various external clients

    1. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      While that is really unprofessional, I do actually find that meme funny in a dark way. But yeah, not good for external clients …

    2. Formerly in HR*

      Several people at my company seem to have a blurb added to the standard signature template, about how sills were created so cats can lounge on them.

  35. Chai Latte*

    To make myself happy this year I change my email signature with any department-wide or staff-wide email every time, and so far no one has noticed.

    Mother of Dragons
    Department Adirondack Chair
    Tacos>Pizza
    etc.

    It makes me happy.

    2. Carol Z*

      A colleague did this, but only on emails to her boss. She was soliciting suggestions from a group of us and it’s the most fun I’ve had at work in ages. It took him almost a month to notice.

    3. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

      There used to be a food place near my house with the name “Pizza vs Burrito”. Literally that.

      They did not survive the pandemic and now that space has a truly excellent Mexican restaurant that is part of a tiny local chain of 3 locations.

  36. aixing*

    Men’s Health Clinic owner listed himself as the CEO (Chief Erection Officer)

    …yes, he spelled it out

    3. Robin*

      Is that work appropriate? Absolutely not.

      Would I laugh if I saw it? Yes. And then I would seriously question his judgement.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          I feel like that makes it even less appropriate. What if he’s supposed to be helping clients who have ED?

    5. Shira VonDoom*

      there are 2 (3?) local T clinics that advertise on the radio. this sounds like something the owner of the clinic with the most cringe (such toxic masculinity, so incel, wowe) ads would do, LOL

  37. ZSD*

    What I MISS being able to put in my signature is that “Hear my Name” function that Alison referred us to about a decade ago. I have a hard-to-pronounce name, and I LOVED being able to set people straight before they met me in person! The company that offered it went under pretty quickly, though.

    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      You could make your own version — just record a SoundCloud clip of you pronouncing your name correctly and link to it.

    5. Hard Name*

      The format might not be what you want/what your IT will allow but it looks like you can do it with Name Drop – namedrop.io

    7. bennie*

      name-coach dot com! I use this for work and for my personal email address. my signature is

      Full Name
      Rhymes with (word) – Listen to a Pronunciation (hyperlinked to name coach)
      Title
      Org
      Address and Contact info

  38. Just Another Zebra*

    We had a new hire who’s signature was pretty standard, but she would add a little picture next to her name. She changed it every day or so, but some ranged from a Christmas tree and snowflake, to a full raw steak, to an axe, to a horse. Once, she was asked to change midday because the icon she chose was offensive (a certain purple foodstuff was involved)

    I could write a dissertation about all the problems she caused, but this was the tip of the iceberg. Luckily, she only lasted about a month before being let go.

      2. Shira VonDoom*

        I’m going to guess eggplant, since that’s a common emoji used to signify a male body part

        1. Timothy (TRiG)*

          Unicode includes hieroglyphics. There’s no need to be coy with when one can just use directly.

          (And it’s called an aubergine. Unicode does not use American English to identify its characters.)

          2. JSPA*

            1. This is a US site that defaults to US usage. The US term (in popular use, that being the appropriate choice because this is not a tech blog) is “eggplant emoji.”

            2. If somebody wanted to post a dick pic, they could use an actual dick pic, if they didn’t mind being fired. Not sure why someone would split the difference and use a penis hieroglyphic.

            3. JA Zebra’s post leaves open whether the emoji-poster intended the eggplant as food or as allusion.

            4. “Yo, why not just post an actual ascii penis”–as a comment here? Really?

            5. Many sites and browsers black-box that emoji. And it’s for a reason; you’re not supposed to be able to drop dick-ascii (or other genitalia for that matter) here.

  39. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    Worst, by far, was my own when I was young, new to the workforce, and had yet to be on the receiving end of a cluebat beating. 40+ lines of random quotes that almost created an incoherent, attempted humorous, conversation. I have no idea how I or my career survived that phase of life.

    1. The Eye of Argon*

      The best part about time is that it’s taking us further and further away from our young adult selves, when we knew everything because we knew nothing.

    2. Blue Cat of Castleton*

      You have my sympathies! I once took a class in office productivity and one of the tips was to make this really info-laden voicemail greeting to inform folks of your usual work hours and your email address, so they could email you instead, etc. I finally realized it was over the top when one of my coworkers left me a mocking voicemail, spelling out his own name, letter by letter and telling me what hours would work best for me to return his call. Needless to say, I took the hint!

  40. sc.wi*

    All of the woman’s college clubs (not academic-related, more like “Intramural Tennis” and “Garden Club”) listed in her signature. There were like, 7 of them. The weird part is that she was in her early thirties and well out of college. I don’t recall any of the clubs having anything to do with her actual work.

    1. NotBatman*

      That seems like it’s gotta be someone who ported her email signature over from college and hasn’t thought about changing it since she was ~21.

  41. LJK123*

    I work in healthcare admin. You know when you send an email from your iphone and if you don’t change it, the default signature is “sent from iphone”?

    Well we had a doctor who I sent an email to and at the end of his response it had:

    “sent from iphone, I named her Velma”

    It was really weird and gave me a good chuckle.

    1. Jamie Starr*

      That reminds me — someone I worked with had their default iPhone signature set to say, “Sent from my landline.”

        1. Jamie Starr*

          I thought it was funny, too; and a clever comment on technology. The person turned out to be a complete jerk with zero sense of humor.

      2. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

        I’ve seen them changed to “sent from the toaster” or “sent from the refrigerator” etc. but never in a work signature.

        1. OtterB*

          I worked on some projects with a professor whose line said “Sent from toaster, please excuse crumbs”

      1. Retiring Academic*

        One of my former colleagues changed the default to ‘Sent from my piece of overpriced technology’.

        1. Curmudgeon in California*

          That one I like.

          Seriously, I get annoyed by the “Sent from my iPhone”. IDGAF what brand your phone is. My branded Android phone doesn’t do that. (If it did I would remove it.) I consider it a default bragging about an expensive phone.

          But ‘Sent from my piece of overpriced technology’? An awesome comment on the cost of common gadgets.

    3. Dobby is a Free Elf!*

      Oh hey! I name my laptops (they have been some variation of Shiny with numbers for the last 10 years or so), but haven’t thought about naming my phone. I should do that.

      And fix my auto signature, because I always forget it needs one, since I have one saved when I send from desktop.

      1. Worldwalker*

        I name my devices because I generally have so many of one sort or another floating around (or still stuffed in the closet because I’m a tech hoarder) and I need to make it clear which one I’m referring to. I think I picked it up from reading Jerry Pournelle’s columns. I get more creative with the computers (this one’s Mike) — my phone is just iThing3. But it is handy for keeping track.

        1. Curmudgeon in California*

          Since I have a lot of computers, tablets, etc, I name them too. Since my Linux boxen need hostnames anyway, I just keep up the habit.

      2. IT Squirrel*

        All my smartphones have been named Rameses Niblik – I started at III, I believe I am now up to Niblik the 7th…

        I also have a laptop called Gary.

    4. Nea*

      I have heard rumors of someone adding “sent from my iPhone” to their signature block in a high-security building.

      1. LabMan*

        Was it on a secured network email? Because that’s hilarious, even if it’s far too much of a, “I will have to explain this to a future clearance investigator,” sort of thing for me!

          1. TrixM*

            As amusing as it is, I personally would not want to be hassled by the IT security team if it found its way to them. Kind of in the vein of making bomb jokes to airport security.

            Sure, they would be able to check where the message originated from at the back end, but they would *definitely* want to have “a wee chat”. To stop giving other people ideas, if nothing else.

    5. Grumpy Biologist*

      My former boss’s wife (who also worked for him, but spent most of her time doing genealogy research, and that was the least egregious thing about her…) had her iPhone signature set to “Yes this was sent from my iPhone expect incomprehensible msg.”

      The messages were always fine, but combined with her irritating (to put it mildly) personality, the signature always elicited an eye-roll from me.

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        Ooooh, how about:

        “Sent from my iPhone, autocorrect is ON”

        To explain incoherent spoonerisms

      2. The Not-A-Fed Fed*

        If you want to have carte blanche for typos even while on desktop, add “Sent from my iPhone” to your signature in Outlook.

    6. Elitist Semicolon*

      I had a student whose emails sometimes ended with “God blesses you from my iPhone.” Something about it struck me as so funny that I really enjoyed getting messages from him. (He’s in seminary now, after ~5 or so years as a professional in STEM.)

    7. Kayem*

      I named mine “in quicksand” because at the time I was still using iTunes and it made me giggle to see it say “syncing in quicksand.” I don’t know how it happened, whether someone did it as a prank or I did it myself while half asleep thinking it was hilarious, but emails now say “Sent from my iPhone, in quicksand.”

      I rarely use that email, so I haven’t bothered to change it.

  42. Former Young Lady*

    One of the meanest, most disingenuous emails I ever got (packed with false accusations and CCed to three levels of leadership) came with the hashtag #Stronger&KinderOnTheOtherSide.

    Sure, Jan.

    This woman has since retired. I hope she is kinder on the other side, but I have my doubts.

    1. Ali + Nino*

      I feel like I’m missing something obvious, but…the other side of WHAT? The computer? The rainbow? Is it a reference to the after-life??

  43. Rachel*

    I have 2 that I still think about from many years ago –

    1. Below the regular signature was a picture of the employee in black & white similar to a confirmation photo with hands in a prayer next to his face (50’s man). Tilted head and prayer hands in a non religious company.

    2. The other was also a picture below the signature, younger woman, extremely low-cut shirt that showed breast tattoos of husband/boyfriend name in large script on 1 side and large rose on the other. Picture was also large, maybe 4″x4″ on each email received.

    This office was the most dysfunctional, yet entertaining office I’ve ever worked in. The stories I could tell from working there almost 10 years.

  44. We’re No. 1!*

    At a former workplace we had to have standardized email signatures (which is fine, pretty normal), but the company required signature was so long it filled the entire length of an 8.5×11 sheet of paper (which, I know, stop printing emails!).

    1. kitryan*

      We work with a lot of those companies, and the signatures tend to stack at the end of the email chains sometimes, so when I make PDF compilations of some of the client communications (part of my job) I can often trim off 5+ pages of signature text! It’s satisfying to see the page count drop when I get rid of all those useless pages.

  45. Miss Fisher*

    I, many years ago in college, would have any number of alternating quotes from the move Empire Records.

    6. SeluciaMD*

      You are my people. My best friend and I celebrate Rex Manning day every year – with cupcakes, of course.

      “I don’t feel the need to explain my art to you, Warren.”

    8. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      LOL, I am glad to know others watched and found the fun in that movie too. It is hard to explain unless you watched it at the time, it seems.

  46. Bridie*

    I don’t see anything crazy, just a lot of variations thanks to coworkers from around the world at all different ages. It’s fun to see how the standard sign-off varies by region. And I do communications so whenever I write a memo from my Australian boss, I have to end it with “Cheers!” It just wouldn’t sound like him without it :)

  47. Ankaret Wells*

    From an eBay buyer many years ago:

    ”A fart is nothing but, the lonely cry of an imprisoned turd ‘ ‘

    In kelly green Comic Sans. The buyer was perfectly pleasant in the actual email!

  48. Rage Against The Pusheen*

    Not sure this counts, but about 20 years ago, I worked at a place where employee email handles followed the first initial, last name format so, for example, jsmith@company.com.

    One of the guys at a branch office had the last name Estes, first initial T.

    I think they finally figured it out, but it took awhile.

      1. Definitely Anon For This*

        My Dad used to work with his brother Peter. Not even a joke, their parents really did give both sons that initial.

    2. Lady_Lessa*

      Currently one of our marketing assistants has with the same protocol has hers as “baby chickens” @ company Not sure if it is embarrassing to her or not, since I don’t have much contact other than brief pleasantries in the break room.

    3. Caledonian Crow*

      Oof! That’s worse than the one from a place I used to work. Last name Odom. First initial S. They eventually added a middle initial.

    4. Charlotte Lucas*

      I worked somewhere that did the same. Then we had a woman with a first name that started with K and the surname Ill.

      Apparently, the woman with a first name that started with S & a last name Exum was OK. She had that email for years.

    5. Other Alice*

      One place I worked at had a urban legend of when they tried to standardize usernames to “first name initial + 3 letters of surname”. Their lead developer was at the time named “Chris Ockham”. The username went on all access logs, lead dev accessed the test servers a lot, senior VP prints out the access logs to review them and starts screaming that someone has been messing with the logs because the leftmost column is just the same obscenity over and over. Company decides to scrap standardisation altogether, goes on to have no standard for emails whatsoever.

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        I know a guy whose username (and email) was “math”. Two letters of his first name, two letters of his last name, he was a geek, it fit perfectly.

      2. TrixM*

        This is why I *vehemently* advocate for randomly-generated short sign-on names when I can. It saves so much hassle.

        My particular peeve is when it’s based on someone’s actual name, because people get married or divorced, and they want their logon name to reflect the change. When you’re in a complex environment with different systems using the same accounts, it can be very challenging. Also, if someone has a long name, why make them type all those letters every time they sign in? There are some Sri Lankan colleagues I’ve felt very sorry for.

    7. Pathfinder Ryder*

      In high school I had a classmate whose name put through the school standard email username formula of surname + first two letters of first name ended up with molest @ school :(

    8. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      I know I’ve mentioned S. Hartgood @ companyname here before. (Last name munged slightly but with the same effect, and there were no periods in the email username.)

  49. BuckeyeIT*

    I work at a Fortune 500 company that has mandatory email signature requirements (down to font & specific colors for specific lines). For some reason one of the department managers felt it was necessary to include a picture of a glittery fairy- complete with animated sparkles- that she changed to a new/different color every two weeks

  50. Doubtful*

    (¸.•´ Purple, comic sans, size 14, with stars and swirls ¸.•*¨) ……….. from the person in charge of making sure all of our client deliverables are formatted according to the standard business templates. Really made one question her judgement.

  51. Snarkus Aurelius*

    Not email signature but the font and background.

    Both of these took place at a government public health agency where we served ****people with disabilities****.

    1) one lady in accounting loved cats. Her office was wall to wall cat posters and at least 100 cat figurines. The background of her emails was a dark lavender color with dancing cats and size ten white font. It looked very Geocities circa 1997.

    2) a psychiatrist (!) used Palace Script MT, size 12, which is small, italicized cursive, font for her emails. You couldn’t read them unless you copied and pasted into plain text. This woman loved to start shit so if you told her you couldn’t read her emails, she would take joy in being a huge bitch about it.

    Both set ups were extremely hard to read. Both individuals were very stubborn and refused to change until IT blocked these options.

    4. Elle Woods*

      I thought my former coworker who liked to rotate between the Curlz, Comic Sans, and Impact fonts was bad. Palace Script is worse.

  52. PositivityToxins*

    “Smile, it’s free therapy!”

    Makes me cringe and get a litte ragey every time I get an email from that person. (Whose main role involves fixing problems that people bring to them…)

    3. Timothy (TRiG)*

      I prefer “Smile. It makes people wonder what you’re up to.”

      Stole that out of a joke book I had as a kid.

  53. Cookies for Breakfast*

    At an old job, the marketing department was very prescriptive about the content of email signatures. Everyone’s had to be exactly the same. There was an all-staff email asking everyone to update their signature by a certain date, and one of the marketing people actually took the time to chase the people who hadn’t done it.

    It wasn’t a terrible signature in itself. The formatting was professional, and most of it was relevant information (name, job title, contact details, a company logo).

    However, it also included a corny quote from the CEO, that also appeared in many company marketing materials. Without being too identifying, it revolved around the concept of loving your job. It was a mildly dysfunctional workplace, and I can only imagine how many external emails with a “love your job” quote went out every day, sent by people who were quietly looking to leave and dump their client portfolios on the next overworked soul.

    2. Lizzo*

      This nerdy Midwesterner was really hoping you worked for Culver’s and that the quote was, “Welcome to delicious.”

  54. EmKay*

    I’ve always wanted to set my OOO message to a gif of Ruby Rhod (from The 5th Element) waving his hand and going “BZZZT”.

    I haven’t yet, because I need to stay employed :)

    1. enlyghten*

      I didn’t come here to play Pumbaa on the radio, so tomorrow from five to seven you’re going to give yourself a hand, green?

  55. Healthcare Manager*

    A previous colleague had advance notice for their leave dates. You’d think be useful except it would routinely be just for 1 day and they weren’t high up enough/in a role for them being off 1 day to really matter…

    1. peacock limit*

      I used to work with a person who set out of office replies any time they were going to be gone for an hour or more. It was bonkers.

      Can’t decided if it was better or worse as the person from the same agency who set an autoreply on 100% of the time saying what location they were working at each day, even if it was in their home office the entire week.

  56. Claudia*

    A few years ago, I was emailing back and forth this guy who began every email with “From The Desk of His Lordship,” which, weird, but okay. (He is not British.) Then one day I received this out-of-office message and, well:

    His Lordship, will be out of the office from [Dates]

    I will be avoiding all forms of contact, including, but not limited to, emails, voicemails, smoke signals, and carrier pigeons, as much as I can.

    If you are an artist, performer, or arts professional and you feel your matter is urgent, please first ask yourself the following:

    (1) Is this really urgent or am I just assuming its urgent because my problems, by their very nature, are always more important than anyone else’s problems?

    (2) Have I asked this question before, but I am hoping that by asking it again I will get an answer I like better?

    (3) Is this matter only urgent because I have been avoiding an unpleasant situation in the hopes that it would magically take care of itself and have now been slapped by the hand of reality?

    If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then I promise to give you my undivided attention when I get back. Otherwise, if this is, in fact, an urgent matter, then please contact [Names]. [Names] are well trained in crisis-management for the arts and will provide soothing balms, calming reassurances, and invaluable aide and assistance.

    2. Warrior Princess Xena*

      I feel like this is the sort of thing that would be amazing in a theatre setting and would go over like a lead balloon in a client-facing business role.

  57. Cee Dee*

    This notice is VERY out of character for this company. They would never sanction this and they are a terrible company.

    “TRULY HUMAN NOTICE: Getting this email out of normal working hours? We work at a digitally-enabled relentless pace, which can disrupt our ability to sleep enough, eat right, exercise, and spend time with the people that matter most. I am sending you this email at a time that works for me. I only expect you to respond to it when convenient to you.”

  58. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

    I sent an email to the CEO of an independent (meaning, not part of one of the major professional leagues) team, in connection with my job.

    I got back a one-line reply of actual communication. Followed by…

    “All the Best,” in larger font; next line, the CEO’s name (Dr. [firstname], which is apparently how he’s known) in larger and blue font, below that, the team’s logo; below that, his full name, title, the Club’s name, his email address and phone number (in a mix of fonts, italicizations, colors, sizes, and capitalizations); and then, a line saying, “Please listen to my ‘Walk Up’ song…”

    There was a 1MB file attached. It was a clip of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger,” starting with the “you think you got the best of me” line. After about five seconds, an announcer’s voice came over the top, announcing, “Giving his all for [team] Nation, the Chairman, CEO, President and Owner of your [team], [NAAAAAAME]!” Ending just in time for the chorus of the song.

    Colleague who was cc’d says “I hope you listen to the walk up song!” He confirmed that the dude attaches this to every email.

    It’s the song that pushes it over the top, for me.

    (Yonks ago in a former life when I was a coder for a living, I once sent a work email from my personal account after hours–and forgot to remove my non-work email signature, which at the time was a random pull from an old-school quotefile. The one that was picked was Batman from an episode of Justice League saying he could use some air support…”because I can’t fly. At all. Now would be good.” The person I emailed asked my boss about it.)

    1. Dobby is a Free Elf!*

      Good luck getting me to listen to an unnecessary audio file in an email. When my second monitor is connected to my laptop, for some indiscernible reason, it makes my speakers stop working. This is only a problem when I’m supposed to be transcribing things, and I don’t like transcribing things, so I haven’t put in the effort to make it stop or purchased external speakers.

      1. Silvercat*

        It may be that the computer thinks the second monitor has speakers. Some connections (hdmi in particular) do that.

        It’s fixable but very annoying

  59. a tester, not a developer*

    I worked with a guy whose name had auto-corrected to Mock Sundeck. Apparently it had been that way for years.

    1. The Eye of Argon*

      Autocarrot once tried to change my last name to “Miniskirt.” My last name is not spelled even anywhere close to miniskirt.

    2. Metal Librarian*

      Back in the days when phones had buttons with three letters on each, a friend typed my name into his phone and it suggested ‘Shrub’. This became my nickname from him thereafter.

  60. chs.29*

    I once was CC’ed on an email ranting about another staff member, who’d made one small, fixable mistake. The email ended with “Cross me once and you’re out of my life. I will not work with her.”

    The email signature was “Be kind to others, bring peace wherever you go, and love always.”

    3. NotBatman*

      Amazing. Reminds me of that Google-prank-gone-wrong on April 1 a few years ago where someone accidentally attached a Minion dropping a mic to a termination letter.

    4. Rhiannon*

      Reminds me of a grandboss I had a few years ago who was such a raging bee-atch, in person and in emails, yet her sig. line was a quote about leadership, empowerment, and kindness.

      I snorted every time I saw it.

  61. LNCPG*

    My friend who works for a Christian college saw a lot of strange ones over the years. My favorite “Under Aslan’s paw”

  62. Lacey*

    I don’t have any examples, but reading the comments has given me insight into why all my employers have had strict rules about what can/must be in your email signature.

    1. londonedit*

      My employers have never had strict rules about it, but I’ve still never worked anywhere where people had quotes or multicoloured text and backgrounds or photos or animated bits and pieces in their signatures! Could be a culture/location thing? Very dull I suppose but mine’s always just been name, job title/department, mailing address, work phone number and that’s all I’ve ever seen from anyone else. Sometimes people will add in a banner advert for one of our upcoming books, but those are proper assets produced by the Marketing department so they’re designed to fit into a signature and are an appropriate and standardised size etc.

      1. Lou*

        I had the multicoloured signature thing going on as a student, LOL. Nobody ever said anything. I think eventually I got a new computer and I no longer had my saved signatures so I started using a normal one instead…

        Ahhh, to be that young and naive again. I gotta say, having a rainbow-patterned signature was pretty fun. I would never do it now, although part of me still wants to, despite everything wrong with the very concept, lol.

    2. Alias Sydney*

      We have rules about what is supposed to be in our signature and how it should be formatted, but people rarely follow it. Thankfully most are pretty normal, with only a few that have different things going on (usually some sort of graphic of an airplane for our industry).

  63. Manchmal*

    Our IT guy (now retired) used have his signature formatted thus:

    James Smith
    Christian, Director if IT

    …as if “Christian” was part of his job title.

  64. Tesuji*

    Heh, this takes me back.

    Back in the day, it was common for people getting online for the first time–who were mostly teenagers and college students–to start off with elaborate signatures. This might have been fine on their local BBS (which were things that existed), but as they worked their upward into larger communities (FidoNet and Usenet), they’d generally get hit by a clue, either kindly-wielded or not, and then scale back.

    As I recall, my first sig included an ASCII art sword in flashing colors, plus a randomly-generated quip from a list of quotes/jokes that I thought were either deep or witty AF. The cringe. Ah, the benefits of having made your early screwups at a point where it would be harder for them to be immortalized for all time somewhere.

    It’s unsurprising to me that kids/young adults these days would have the same energy we did, especially when the pendulum seems to have swung to “Well, no need to train anyone in how to professionally interact, since I’m sure everyone’s just picked it up by osmosis because of how online everyone is, right?”

    1. RTG123*

      “the benefits of having made your early screwups at a point where it would be harder for them to be immortalized for all time somewhere.”

      I think this, about so many things, almost daily.

  65. madge*

    Anyone who sends me an email with an animated unicorn prancing across the page gets catapulted to #1 priority. Please and thank you

    1. enlyghten*

      A colleague gave me a picture of an alpaca with its wool died light pink, a unicorn horn, and a rainbow in the background. It’s not animated, but it gets me to smile from time to time.

  66. KT*

    We have one employee right now that cannot resist putting a photo in her signature. This is against company guidelines but if it were a small unobtrusive photo it wouldn’t bother me. But it is an ENORMOUS photo. Unsurprisingly this employee also frequently neglects to use our normal documentation systems in her work so in my (compliance-related) role I end up having to print her emails fairly often and if I don’t remember to limit printing to one page (usually relevant info is only a line or two) it prints out over FOUR PAGES of solid color and it makes me really grumpy. Like not only do I have to do this extra step because you can’t be bothered to file a simple report but now instead of using one sheet of paper you’ve wasted 4.

    1. Miss Muffet*

      So often we see this in the letters to Allison, don’t we? This one annoying thing is really just the canary in the coal mine to a wholllllllle lotta other issues.

  67. Eater of Cupcakes*

    “Analyst misspelled as Analist”
    Okay, but the dirty part is there in both spellings. Just saying. :)

    1. jane's nemesis*

      I think the joke is that the person misspelled their own job title, not that it’s a dirty word :)

    2. Queer Earthling*

      On an old forum I was on, someone’s (obviously non-work) signature was something like, “Despite appearances, ‘analogy’ does not mean ‘the study of assholes.'” It’s been like 12 years since I last frequented that forum but that pops into my head a lot. This is one of those times.

    3. Dorothy Gale*

      I can’t explain why, but my brain emphasizes the ANAL much more when reading misspelled version.

  68. Former call centre worker*

    I got a job working for a local council’s education department in a team of admin assistants. I had no experience or professional knowledge of the sector. One of my new colleagues had the email signature “gifted and talented administrator”. I was a little taken aback by her praising herself in her own email signature. It was weeks before I realised she was the administrator for a programme for high-achieving students, which I had never heard of, called Gifted and Talented.

    2. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I once had the title “Love Editor,” which was relevant to the structure of the publication but made for some interesting reactions.

      1. Sue D. O'Nym*

        A friend of mine has a brother in law who’s title at one point was “Bacon Accounting”. Sadly, he did not have to account for all the bacon, but was in the accounting department for the bacon line of business.

    3. t-vex*

      I was in a meeting with some Civil Works people a few years ago and they kept calling this one guy the “damn manager.” I couldn’t believe the level of disrespect to this person who was sitting right there until he handed me his card and I realized his job is to manage the dams.

  69. Turingtested*

    I’m paraphrasing the quote but a salesman had the Hunter S Thompson quote “I don’t advocate sex, drugs or violence but it’s always worked for me” in his email signature. The business in question is an autoparts manufacturer. Call me prim but I like my professional relationships free of sex, drugs and especially violence.

  70. Millennial*

    This isn’t an email signature exactly but I feel it’s the same genre:

    A young man who worked at my company for eight weeks before leaving for a different job, describes his experience with us on LinkedIn as, “Retired after eight weeks of distinguished service to the Firm”

  71. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

    Mine is innocuous compared to everything else in this thread, but we had a PM whose signature was, in bold, “There are multiple solutions to every problem and we solution better as a team!” The PM was kind of clueless and a nightmare to work with. I was on a project with her once and she kept derailing it with inane questions and objections, to the point where the team would get a new email from her every 5 minutes. Her signature was imprinted on my retina forever after seeing it 20+ times in one day.

      1. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

        That’s a pretty brilliant take! I would totally approve, and maybe even adopt, this signature if that were the case.

      2. Curmudgeon in California*

        “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.” – from a chemist.

        1. allathian*

          “A supersaturated solution is a solution that holds more than it can hold.” Anonymous cemistry student quoted in one of Richard Lederer’s hilarious bloopers books.

  72. BlueWolf*

    I don’t recall ever seeing anything too egregious at my workplace. Definitely a few people with weird fonts and colors and maybe some inspirational quotes. Even so, IT changed everyone’s to a standardized signature format when we did a re-brand. We had some customization options like adding pronouns if we wanted, but they keep it pretty tight now.

  73. YarnEnvy*

    The lady who did payroll at our large, int’l corp. used magenta Comic Sans and a professionally staged photo of her poodle in a stroller.

    1. WhyAreThereSoManyBadManagers*

      Haha maybe she was a poodle breeder outside of her primary job…this is not uncommon for photos on dog breeder websites to be extra cutesie when promoting new litters, lots of baskets and bows and yes probably strollers.

    2. Lunch Eating Mid Manager*

      I am here for this! My last job also had a kook in Payroll who would send out very quirky reminders when it was time to turn in timesheets. I think something about being in a stuffy finance role can bring out the eccentric qualities over email!

  74. Serenity*

    I recently received a forwarded email about a community resource from a non profit’s Executive Director. It included his email signature… which included a scan of his actual ink signature.

    And then I did an even bigger double take because as someone old enough to have gone through school writing everything, my writing looks like… I don’t know… experienced cursive? I have kids. My kids learned cursive but hardly used it, so though they can write with it, their signatures look… childish to me. Unpracticed. Still like 5th grade cursive. That’s not meant to be a judgement. It’s writing that looks like someone didn’t take notes or write papers by hand for 10 years.

    The ED’s actual, included scanned ink signature on his email sig looked like a kid signed it. Whyyyyyy???

    1. NotBatman*

      I know that that’s not nearly as much of a security threat as it would’ve been 20 years ago, but it still feels like a heck of a security threat to blast copies of your handwritten signature all over the internet.

      2. Wintermute*

        now it’s a whole new kind of security threat. If someone compromises his business email and replaces that image with a “magic pixel” attack, they’re hosed.

    2. Kayem*

      Maybe he’s one of those people who believes signatures have to be in cursive and having not practiced it in regular writing, it’s less polished? The number of people I’ve dealt with who believe signatures are required to be in cursive still amazes me. I’ve had my signature rejected by various offices because it’s not my name in cursive. Of course it’s not. If I had to write my name in cursive for every document I signed, I’d never get anything else done (my name is long, that’s why my signature is my scribbled initials).

    3. Mademoiselle Sugarlump*

      When I worked for a bank and we actually signed financial things, a lot of people had scribbly signatures that weren’t very legible. That’s why you often have a line to print your name below that.
      It’s your own mark, it’s not just your name written in cursive.

  75. Corrigan*

    We have someone who will end every email with “Have a wonderful, productive and impactful day!” If it’s the end of the day they will change it to something like. “Have a wonderful, productive and impactful last 15 minutes of your day!” (Ironically, I can guarantee that this person is never themselves having a productive day.)

    Then, their signature is “In Light & Liberty, [name]”. This by itself wouldn’t be so bad, but together it’s a lot.

    1. no, my day is meaningless*

      wow, until the last paragraph I thought you worked at the same place I do. Apparently more than one person has that impactful day sh*te.

  76. Keymaster of Gozer*

    The one that led to the creation of a company-standard email signature afterward:

    No less than 10 photos of her and her children, interspersed with quotes of ‘funny things they said to mummy’ and links to a ‘vote for the cutest child’ website.

    We’re an engineering firm.

    2. General Izable*

      I had a landlord one time who responded to every repair request, rent payment, etc. with “I have received your massage.”

  78. StopSigningEmails*

    What is with the need to have email signatures that are a photo of the person’s signature? This is an email. You didn’t sign it, and half of the time in Outlook it just shows as a red X.

  79. Grammar Nerd*

    My husband had a Julia Child quote for a long time: “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”

  80. IAAL*

    School district central office employee whose signature said that they worked for [District] Pubic Schools. I was either the first person to notice or the first to tell them.

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        I used to work in environmental testing back in the 80s. At that time the Leaking UST testing and remediation initial program was in full swing. Yes, we usually handled it by spelling the first word out.

      2. Wintermute*

        ah the good old “scunthorpe problem”, so named after the UK town that caused mail relays absolute conniptions in the early days of the internet.

  81. NotBatman*

    My manager’s signature contains a joke about how his job is so boring and pointless that he never bothers to do any work for it. Considering his primary job is managing and communicating with us, I’ve always found it off-putting.

  82. Anonemailsig*

    “ My wish is that all all women age 20 and above perform monthly breast self-examinations”

    From a male coworker…we don’t work in oncology…

    1. physics lab tech*

      that’s so creepy! I got one of those once, but not from a creepy coworker, from a beloved if ditzy aunt. I responded with a very detailed description of my recent biopsy and she never followed up

    3. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

      On one hand, I hope he didn’t lose a romantic partner, mother, grandmother, sister, or daughter to breast cancer, and this is his way of processing trauma. On the other hand, the potential to veer into sexual harassment territory is too great and NO ONE male or female should be adding that to a signature.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Right? Even if you do want to add a PSA about self-exams to your email, this would not be the correct wording for it….

    4. a tester, not a developer*

      I’d try and keep a charitable mind, and assume he tragically lost someone to breast cancer. But even if that’s the case, put a link to the Cancer Society or something my dude.

    5. The Other Evil HR Lady*

      “My wish is that all men age 40 or over get their yearly prostate exams.”

      Not sorry!

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        How about, instead, “Remember to get the appropriate cancer screenings for your age and gender. Cancer sucks.”?? (Maybe you would have to leave off the last part.)

        1. allathian*

          Yes, this. Not to mention that not all men have prostates and not all women have breasts. And even cis men can get breast cancer, like my dad.

  83. Warrior Princess Xena*

    Not ‘weird’ exactly, but I email a lot of banks, hospitals, and other clients that work with sensitive and/or private data frequently and I’m always interested in seeing how ferocious their ‘This message came from outside your office’ additions are. Most are pretty reasonable – 2-3 sentences alerting you that the message is from an outside source and reminding you to be careful of which data you send out. But some of them are just absurd. A full page of “This message may contain sensitive and private data”, including selections from the relevant regulatory body (HIPAA is pretty common) on an email that says “Hope you got everything!” and nothing else is sometimes good for a laugh.

    1. PsychNurse*

      You’re so right. Also, my work used to have an automatic signature that said “Please consider the environment before printing this message.” People would sometimes get mad, because the corporate office did all kinds of things that were incredibly wasteful and bad for the environment. People would say “Now I”m supposed to feel bad about printing an email??”

      1. Violet*

        People would say “Now I”m supposed to feel bad about printing an email??”

        That’s a yes from me!

    2. ecnaseener*

      The funniest thing is when people use those work emails for personal stuff, so you get emails from your Uncle Bob like “Can we do Thanksgiving dinner early so we can hit the road at 5? THE INFORMATION IN THIS MESSAGE IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE PERSON TO WHOM IT IS ADDRESSED. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS MESSAGE IN ERROR, PLEASE CONTACT COMPLIANCE @ LLAMASINC . COM AND DELETE IT IMMEDIATELY.

    3. FlyingAce*

      In my company, entry level employees and supervisors get a companyname.(country code) email which is accessed via webmail (so for example, employees in France would get a companyname.fr address). Middle management and above gets a companyname.com email and a full Office license. For some reason, the Exchange server recognizes emails coming from non-.com domains as external emails (despite being from the same company) and adds [POTENTIAL PHISHING] to the subject. It’s a pain in the backside when searching for related emails…

  84. CL*

    The relatively new coworkers that have our company’s old address in the signature…a building that we closed down during the pandemic and that these colleagues never actually set foot in.

    1. ecnaseener*

      Lol a supervisor in my office had an outdated, broken link to our website in her signature years after the link had changed, and new employees would copy it. Oops.

  85. Moonlight Elantra*

    “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” – Union Gen. John Sedgwick, moments before being shot in the head at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, U.S. Civil War.

    Inappropriate? Maybe. But I laughed every single time I got an email from that guy.

  86. Moira Rose's Closet*

    One of many reasons that I don’t like being a lawyer is that I never see funny signatures or weird things in emails. I would just love to have coworkers who used some of these. “Happy Cake-Baking Day”!? Yes please!

    1. Wintermute*

      how about split the middle?

      “IF THIS CAKE HAS BEEN BAKED FOR YOU IN ERROR PLEASE CONTACT xxxxxxxxxx AND DELETE IT IMMEDIATELY. THIS CAKE SHALL NOT BE DEEMED TO CONSTITUTE BAKING ADVICE NOR ESTABLISH A BAKER/CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. “

  87. HalJordan*

    This one’s just charming, but a contact from a non-Anglophone country has a default English language sign-off that is slightly archaic and almost conventional (think “I remain / Yours very truly / Anatole”). But he’s missed a bit, so what we receive is the following:

    I remain,

    Anatole

    And it’s delightful

    1. PsychNurse*

      I would be so baffled, as well as charmed, if I received that. Even the full version! But just the I remain is amazing.

      1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

        I am getting “Hamilton” vibes here.

        “I have the honor to be
        Your obt svt
        A. Burr”

      2. HalJordan*

        I mean, “Yours truly” on its own is innocuous, and sort of implies the “I remain”, but… Anatole you left out the wrong part :)

        Makes me smile every time though

    2. HannahS*

      That’s very endearing! One of my older family members has a similar way of speaking, having learned English most from reading. It’s charming to hear them say things like, “I’m sorry for the delay. I was engaged in my morning ablutions.”

    3. Adultier Adult*

      I laughed out loud in the middle of a meeting. LOL I remain…Anatole. My new sign off for all things.

    4. Rowan*

      That would work really well as a passive-aggressive “you keep getting my name wrong, here it is one more time”

    5. Ev*

      I honestly love this. It does away with all the ruminations about “is this closing too informal/intimate/obsequious/irritating” and just states the fact of who it’s from. Good for Anatole.

  88. scurvycapn*

    I’m surprised companies aren’t standardizing/locking down signatures more. My employer has done this for years. The ability to manage or add signatures is completed disabled in Outlook. IT manages all signatures which use a template and just plug in your name, position, certifications, and contact info.

    When you send an email, it inserts the signature when it’s going outside of the organization or leaves it off if it is internal. No one can go rogue with dumb signatures, and internal email chains aren’t filled with fluff. It’s great.

    1. physics lab tech*

      you’re not wrong! I work at a college and it’s very free reign here. The students will often have every club, their gpa and linked in page on their signature so idk. Seems almost like professional norms training for us at this point.

      but the. my own is just links on how to access mental health services for the students, so it takes all types.

    2. Alias Sydney*

      They already lock down enough. I don’t think they need to lock down signatures. If there’s a problem with a signature, the manager should be able to deal with it among their direct reports.

    3. Harried HR*

      That would drive me bonkers !! I have 30+ signatures that I use to answer typical standard e-mails. I use a specific signature and add the relevant info not having access to signatures at all would make my job 100% harder

    4. Kevin v*

      My company has a standard signature and I refuse to use it.
      1) it has links, including img links to icons, to the company’s social media sites, which means every email has tracking tags in them that don’t even benefit us, just the social media companies.
      2) it includes our own logo as well but as an embedded graphic. Although fairly insignificant on its own, having it repeated a 1000 times in the sent items folder just eats up quota disk space.
      3) it has both my work & cell phone number in it. I’m in tech support, my cell is for company to contact me in an emergency and my desk number is for other tech support, not so end users can jump the queue by calling me direct (at either number)

      I have 3 plain email sigs: a) My full name and email address, b) my full name, title and email address, c) my full name, title, phone & email address.

      The phone one rarely gets used, mostly for outside vendors. I only use the one with my title when I think it’s some person that needs to know why when I say “no” it’ll probably stick.

    5. This Old House*

      I’d be so frustrated if we didn’t have internal signatures as a matter of policy! It’s bad enough that some people leave them off. It’s by far the easiest way to find an internal phone number when you need to call someone here. The Outlook “Contact” screen seems to default to only allowing you to call via Teams, rather than showing someone’s extension anywhere at all, and to find a phone number elsewhere takes you through many clicks and many screens before you find the directory on our internal portal. I literally just moments ago needed to tell someone something and make sure they got it right away – but the person in questions doesn’t keep a signature on internally, so I walked to another floor – easier and quicker than finding a directory!

    6. Qadata*

      My work has standardised email signatures (but not enforced) for long enough that most just follow along to show willing.
      They did try to lock in an automated email signature about a year ago with partial success.
      My work has multiple divisions but the new signature for one of those divisions was set as the default for every division. It was especially confusing for some of my coworkers who deal a lot with overseas contacts who have never heard of our other business divisions. Worse, the job titles on the signatures were often incorrect. Did I mention the change was unannounced too?
      After a few days and multiple complaints, that division issue was corrected but the job title issue remained unresolved. I tried setting my own default but it kept reverting each day. Instead, I did some digging and located where the default signature file was saved. With a bit of testing and judicious file renaming, I was able to lock my own signature as my default. It’s remained the same ever since.

  89. PsychNurse*

    This isn’t a funny signature but: A while back I saw an instagram post about how nurses list every credential they have in their signature line (RN, LPN, ABCD, First Aid certified, USA, third grade spelling bee winner). It really gave me a chuckle because mine definitely does say “RN, BSN, APRN-intern.”

    1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I have three professional credentials, they’re all relevant to my job, and you bet they’re all in my signature. :P

      2. DannyG*

        I refer to that as my “alphabet soup” and my quote is: “All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.”
        Paracelsus

        1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          I have no quote. The only thing I’ve added to our standard signature template that isn’t already in there is my pronouns and a line including upcoming scheduled PTO chunks of 3 days or more. Otherwise, it’s straight off the corporate template.

        2. Hungry Magpie*

          Oooooh, are you a toxicologist? I am also part of the alphabet soup club. As a (youngish, female) regulator, I find it helps to remind folks that I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, as it were.

    2. It's Marie - Not Maria*

      I am a Senior HR Professional with multiple certifications. You better believe I have them in my email signature. I worked really hard for those, and I am going to show them off.

    3. Seahorsesarecute*

      Long before the internet, when I was still in school, I remember a talk show interview with someone who said you should have professional business cards printed up to hand out at job interviews and have all your credentials on your business cards.

      If you didn’t have any credentials, just make something up, people will assume you have a degree and hardly ever ask what it means. This person had DMA after their name on their business card. Stood for Doesn’t Mean Anything! Wonder how long it would take someone to notice and say something if I just changed my e-mail signature?

    4. Eff Walsingham*

      After WWII was over and my Mum’s cohort went off to college (or did not), one of her close friends became a nurse with 2 degrees. Mum said, “Aren’t you supposed to list them in the order you received them?” but couldn’t persuade her friend to call herself “Doris Smithson, BA, RN” But Mum tended to call her that. Pronounced “BARN” of course!

  90. Pangolin*

    My mum worked with someone with (a less anonymous version of) this signature:
    “Camelid consultant with all that entails, including a specialty in Llama Development. Communicator. Marketer. Camerado. Podcaster. Alongsider. Spitting Coach. Husband. Father. Christian. Apostle. And much more….”
    My family and I have had a lot of fun coming up with our own version of this.

  91. Aggretsuko*

    I used to know somebody who had the following (I will fudge it a bit):

    “If you believe you are experiencing a (redacted) emergency, please remember:
    (a) there are no (redacted) emergencies
    (b) take deep breaths and let that sense of urgency go
    (c) google “goats in trees” and be joyful.”

    I dearly wished I could have said something like that because literally every single thing in my job is an emergency.

  92. WhyAreThereSoManyBadManagers*

    In the email signature of someone very full of himself (a former politician):
    “Unless we have a CONFIRMED meeting time on MY calendar and unless I’ve ALSO given you separate WRITTEN confirmation at least one day before that I’ll be attending, I will likely NOT be present for said arranged meeting.”

  93. Kath*

    Not exactly an email signature, but still a weird title someone decided to use for themselves. I used to work in accounts payable in a government department, and would occasionally receive invoices for services from a guy who headed his invoices “John Smith, Olympian”. The services rendered were in no way sports-related. This seemed like such an aggressive power move.

  94. Henrietta Gondorf*

    Our admin/supply guy had (mildly paraphrased) “The average response time for police in an emergency is 11 minutes. The average response time of .357 Magnum is .11 seconds”. He attributed this to a famous general (maybe Patton?).

    He subsequently was fired and prosecuted for theft and fraud.

      1. anon today*

        Sounds like some of our regulars on Nextdoor.

        Person 1: “BOLO for this person who’s stealing parcels/casing houses/trying car door handles! [Ring camera video follows]”

        Persons 2-15: Various responses

        Person 16: “See, this is why we need to exercise our 2nd amendment rights! If we didn’t have so many sissy liberals in this city, people would be AFRAID to try that s***!!!11!!”

  95. Choggy*

    Someone in my company used the tagline from a completely different company/different line of work in her signature because her last name matched one of the words in the tagline. I always thought that was very odd.

  96. iglwif*

    I am a lay leader in my congregation. All the office staff use email signatures that include their name, job title, phone number, and email … BUT ALSO an image of their signature, the congregation’s logo, and a bunch of linked icons to things like the website and our social media.

    In the right email client I’m sure this looks great! In the email client I use, it looks … non-optimal, and on my phone, each of those things is a separate attachment, which not only looks dreadful but also makes it almost impossible to find and open any *actual* attachments (such as documents and spreadsheets) they may be sending me.

    They are permanent staff and I am a volunteer on a two-year term, so I have not said anything, but it’s annoying.

    1. Alias Sydney*

      Yes, having graphics or linked graphics can cause chaos in the wrong email client, and I will get responses to emails with all of these attachments of the graphic files that don’t show up because it went through three different email servers. It’s annoying.

    2. Madeleine Matilda*

      I would say something because they may not realize that the setup isn’t displaying properly in all email clients and especially on cell phones. Congregants are probably willing to overlook it, but it could be off putting to others who reach out to the church.

      1. iglwif*

        See I feel weird about saying anything because I know I’m still using Hotmail so it’s probably my own fault lol. But you’re right, maybe I should.

        (It’s not a church, btw.)

        1. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

          Sure, you’re still using Hotmail, but you don’t need to mention that things look weird in your email client. If you point out that their signatures are making it almost impossible to see and open attachments using your mobile device, “but iglwif is still using hotmail” would be obviously irrelevant.

      2. iglwif*

        I missed the first half of your last sentence: trust me, our congregants are the LAST people who will overlook something that annoys them XD We’ve had factions arguing nonstop about masking during services and remote participation for the past 18 months at least.

    3. Artemesia*

      I would thing widely broadcasting your signature would be an invitation to fraud. Casual contacts don’t need to know how to apply for credit cards or whatever with your signature.

      1. iglwif*

        I don’t know that anyone’s thought of that, but it’s a good point. I mean, we’re a small congregation and we mostly all know each other … but affinity group fraud is a real thing.

        You can’t really apply for a credit card with just someone’s signature, can you? Like don’t you also need stuff like their social insurance / social security number and address and so on? One of the peculiarities of this dynamic is of course that office staff can access the shul directory and see where congregants live, but the reverse is not usually true. (And nobody knows anyone else’s SIN, except I guess the payroll company.)

        1. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

          And nobody knows anyone else’s SIN…

          I sincerely hope I’m the first to say that, given where you work, I don’t think that statement is entirely accurate.

  97. Kn*

    About 2o years ago, I was at a BigLaw firm and got an email from an attorney at a different BigLaw firm (and frankly his was much bigger BigLaw) – his signature was “Patent Attorneys Do It With Novelty”.

    Not that it’s not funny, but the culture was NOT really such. I showed a more seasoned coworker and she said he probably wins a lot of his cases, rainmakers get a very wide berth.

  98. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    Work Email Signature – Non-Faith Based Employer: “Jesus Loves You. Ask Me How to Help You Find Your Path to Salvation. Otherwise, Satan Awaits.” Maybe if you worked for a Religious Institution?

    I’m Jewish….

    3. Curmudgeon in California*

      Ugh. I would not want to engage that person in any conversation, email or otherwise. That .sig is just offensive.

    4. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      A guy I worked with at a big box store had a t-shirt similar to that.

      He was really annoyed when there followed a blanket ban on non-plain shirts. It was 100% due to his shirt.

  100. Llamas and Donuts*

    Not terrible, but interesting…about 17 years ago I worked with a woman whose name was an unmistakably, traditional masculine name (think Matthew, or John, or Scott). Maybe some people in her situation would have changed their name or adopted a more gender-neutral nickname, but she unabashedly used her full original name — her right, it’s her name. Her email signature was the pinkest, curlicue-est, most impossible to read, most cotton-candy font and color imaginable, with a bold “Miss” in front of her name. Funny how in more recent years a situation like this has been more elegantly addressed by a simple “(She/her)” after a person’s name!

    1. FashionablyEvil*

      I had a colleague who did the same thing, “MRS. Jamal Worthington” also in curlicue script (although I think it was in navy blue, which is part of our corporate color palette.)

    2. Danish*

      Love it! And reminds me of a coworker who would bring her pit bull to work – a lovely sweet white and gray dog – with the biggest pinkest flower on its collar, because apparently people see a pit bull and assume it’s male and she was TIRED OF IT.

  101. The Other Evil HR Lady*

    I don’t mind this one too much… it’s a lovely sentiment, but it’s at the bottom of a senior administrator’s signature that my company is a client of, so it’s a teeny-tiny (as in, I’m not judging her, but other people might) unprofessional. It reads: “Use your voice for kindness, your ears for compassion, your hands for charity, your mind for truth, and your heart for love. – Anonymous.” The only problem (note, again, I don’t mind it!) is that they work for a financial and retirement services company, so it’s not terribly appropriate… although it’s not inappropriate either, so… meh.

    However, I’ve seen all kinds of funky signatures in my years in HR, most of which I can’t and don’t care to remember. But if you’re applying and replying to potential employers, please make sure your email signature is super boring: just your name and phone number. That’s it.

    1. Kevin v*

      “…make sure your email is super boring: just your name and phone number”

      I would actually add your email address to that. “Why? It’s already in the from field?” Because frequently emails end up in some ticketing or HR or processing system or just forwarded with the header deleted and the from gets stripped out or mangled. Having it in the body is just a bit of insurance that has saved me a few times.

      1. Fives*

        I do that because I have a *very* common last name. There are two of us in my company and to differentiate, they gave me a middle initial in my email. I put it in my signature so the other Fives doesn’t get my mail. Or more of it at least.

        1. Labrat*

          I have a super common name, first and last, so I add my middle name to just about everything. Still common, but it helps differentiate me. 23 years ago, I did this to the displayed name field on my work e-mail account. I’d done that with my home and school accounts with no problem.

          Yeah, despite still being a seperate field from the e-mail address, it actually changed my e-mail on the work system… As was discovered several months later.

  102. Out of the Work Cult*

    I once had a colleague sign off their email like this:
    Sending you each love and Gemini sparkles,
    Your resident art bitch

  104. All Het Up About It*

    Maybe because I’m just really tired and a lot overwhelmed at the moment… but dang if the “Field Work” signature doesn’t sound appealing.

  105. MassMatt*

    I had a manager with a crazy signature. It wasn’t so much the content, it was the fact that it was large, with crazy fonts (yes, plural, and one was comic sans but that alone was not bad enough) AND animated, so individual letters would shift colors.

    You are no doubt wondering were her emails themselves any better? Alas, no. No, they were not. Bold, italic, underlining, multiple fonts and colors…. And this was at a pretty conservative financial firm. My eyes still ache at the memory.

  106. Kate*

    None of mine are as hilarious as plenty of these, but I persist in the belief that in academia, clearly apocryphal/misattributed quotes are by definition unprofessional. As is spelling Gandhi “Ghandi.”

  107. turquoisecow*

    I worked with someone who had the name of the company in his signature wrong. Say the company was something like Beatific Teapot Design Company, and people called it theBT Company, and he wrote Beautiful Teapots Company as his signature. A coworker and I wondered if we should tell him.

    1. AJ*

      I used to work with a weasel coworker who used to send unimportant emails to lists including the engineering VP (software company, lots of anal retentive detail oriented people). This weasel didn’t realize that the capitels in the company name were very specific, not the first letter, happened a lot in the 90s. I enjoyed seeing that signature in every email he sent to company bigwigs.

      1. anon today*

        My landlord doesn’t have a Word template with letterhead in the first page header; everyone just types the name and address. And they typically get the name of the apartment complex wrong. (Not a different property of the same company, they just can’t spell the name of the place right. “Historical Name Apartment” instead of “Historical Name ApartmentS” or they misspell Historical Name.)

  108. Blue Cat of Castleton*

    This one was strange only because of a language barrier. It was an email from a vendor we used in Germany, and the entire signature was in German.

    The first line was “Schloss Schellenberg – Turmflugel”, which, naturally I assumed was the person’s name, so I began to respond with “Dear Schloss,” Fortunately my spidey senses kicked in and I looked again and saw the person’s actual name a few lines above and corrected it before I sent the response.

    I googled the phrase in question and had a good laugh when I realized I almost called the person a castle.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I have some knowledge of German and this gave me a good laugh too! “Dear Castle,” lol. Thank you!

    2. iglwif*

      That’s awesome.

      I work for a multi-national company and I am now VERY VERY CAREFUL about this kind of stuff.

  109. I edit everything*

    Ten or twenty years ago, my father’s email signature was “The complete lack of supporting evidence is only proof the conspiracy is working.”
    He used it a a joke–he was a scientist and not inclined toward conspiracies at all–and it was funny when he started using it. These days, when I think about it, it makes me cringe. I think he stopped using it a few years before he died.

    1. 1LFTW*

      I can imagine laughing at that once upon a time. These days I wouldn’t so much cringe as want to cry.

  110. HC*

    When I worked in political journalism way back in the Obama era, I was on the press release mailing list for a candidate for U.S. Senate (not state Senate, actual U.S. Senate) whose email signature featured the photos and names of their multiple pet cats… some of which were apparently no longer alive, as they also had date ranges listed in colorful Comic Sans. The candidate did not win.

  111. JustMe*

    I work at a university. Many students from East Asian countries choose an American or Anglicized name to go by (we neither encourage nor discourage it–we leave it up to the students). I have seen some doozies, but over the past few months, I’ve been working with a student (let’s call him Delun) who is kind but a little clueless and who keeps unintentionally getting himself into trouble in ways that he should see coming but for some reason does not. He always signs off his emails as “Delun/PROMETHEUS.”

    1. JustMe*

      Plot twist, Delun the student doesn’t even use Prometheus as his “American” name. His chosen American name is Dave, but he usually just goes by Delun.

  112. Amanda*

    Not the strangest, but I used to frequently email with someone who always spelled my name Amenda. My boss and I could never figure out why he swapped the middle a with an e!

  113. nora*

    I work for a state government and our email sigs are extremely rigid. I’m surprised I haven’t been called out yet for having my name read Nora Bobora, MSW, since I’m not sure anyone else includes similar credentials. My argument is they hired me for my degree and it makes me look better to outsiders, so there.

    I am embarassed to admit I once worked as a caseworker for a nonprofit which standard sig was a full half-page long, including name/title/all contact info/agency tagline/legal disclaimer and A THUMBNAIL OF A PROMOTIONAL YOUTUBE VIDEO. Mandatory on all outgoing mail, even internal replies. It made email chains of any length essentially impossible to read. My clients hated it, imagine scrolling through that nonsense on your phone. Big Boss did not care one bit, she wanted that damn video on everything all the time.

  114. Rapunzel Rider*

    “College prepared me for life but ruined my credit, my liver, and my reputation.” from the faculty Program Coordinator (main contact person for inquiries, applicants and students) of a graduate level education degree program at a public state university on their university email.
    Funny for a gag gift magnet, but not exactly portraying the program as being professional.

  115. ecnaseener*

    Oh, and this one was very sweet but a bit much on every single email: “Best wishes for peace, harmony, health and conquering
    COVID in 2021.”

  116. Ashley*

    I knew a lady who told you to spay and neuter your pets complete with a picture. It was the picture that made it really bad. Her company and role had absolutely nothing to do with animals.

    1. Ariadne Oliver*

      I hesitate to ask but… what was the picture? (Like just a random dog/cat or was it specifically related to spaying/neutering….?)

    2. Gumby*

      I mean, The Price Is Right has nothing to do with animals and they remind watchers to spay and neuter their pets in every episode. If it’s good enough for Bob Barker…

  117. Sociology Rocks!*

    We are a partner on an aid project of the US government. One of our frequent gov liaisons, has a perfectly normal professional signature of name title and department and contact info and so on, and then below it all, in bright blue italicized comic sans: “if you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
    It’s so bad, but also incredibly on the nose for who this person is.

  119. Dilly*

    I knew a federal gov’t employee whose signature block on his gov’t email account was:

    His Heaviness, [FirstName] “Heavy” [LastName]

    And then it included a logo from a MLB team!

  120. lilchickshan*

    After a standard ttfn, name/address/email/numbers/websites:

    NEVER SEND ME A PURCHASE ORDER WITHOUT COPYING XXX OR YYY (yes in all caps)

    “Women Are Like Angels. When Someone Breaks Our Wings, We simply Continue To Fly; Usually On A Broomstick! We Are Flexible Like That..” (yes with the capitalizations just like that though I failed to capture the font.)

    She is a joy and a pleasure to work with, let me tell you (eye roll).

  121. Dilly*

    Oh, and just saw this one in my inbox. At first it starts out pretty normal:

    Name
    Title, Company Name

    But then it says “former XXX at YYY” and then after that it says Name is a 2021 X award winner and a 2020 ZZZ Awardee.

  122. Msspel*

    A slight variation on the theme – as a prank, we gave a coworker a terrible email signature. (Spoiler: no harm done, everyone had a nice time)

    A few years ago I was sharing an office with three coworkers. It was a great group, we had a lot of fun and got along well. We had been teasing Fergus about the dangers of leaving his computer unlocked while he was away from his desk, and since he just laughed us off we decided to prove the point. So one morning when he was off at a meeting we went into his unlocked computer and changed his email signature from “Sincerely,” to “Congratulations!”(We were inspired by the reports at the time, that that’s how Trump University signed off on emails to students/victims). For maximum comedic impact, and to make absolutely sure Fergus would notice the edit before emailing anyone, we set his new signature to size 30 font and put it in rainbow colors. There might have been some emojis and gifs too.

    As planned, he noticed the edit immediately and we all had a nice laugh. But I don’t think he ever got in the habit of locking his computer.

    1. Elly*

      Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow turns their screen upside down. That’s the punishment we use for leaving screens unlocked!

  123. it’s me I’m the problem it’s me*

    This was me…

    A decade+ ago. First full time job, really. With a pretty prestigious government agency. Very young. Oh so young.

    I worked in one department for several months, where I only emailed with friends or individuals for one-off communications. I created rotating email signatures that I liked or thought were funny – from Gloria Steinem to Grouch Marx.

    I was promoted to another department where my responsibilities included all-staff emails (which included VERY VERY IMPORTANT GOVERNMENT PEOPLE). I failed to remove the quotes my first week. I open an email. Address it. Signature automatically populates. As it does. I get distracted. And hear that “whoosh.”

    I sent EVERYONE an email that said “I never forget a face, but I your case I’ll make an exception. – Groucho Marx” Nothing else. That was the entire body of the email.

    After my heart found its way back into my chest from my stomach (I have no idea how long it was). I replied all (which really, just called MORE attention to the email) and went very overboard in my apology.

    I had the head of IT come show me how to recall emails shortly after that, and heard many a story from so many people about more embarrassing email mishaps. In the end, I definitely entertained more people than I insulted. (Hopefully?)

    First week on the job and I insulted everyone’s face.

    I actually ended up really loving that job and everyone I worked with and I think I was very successful. Fun start though.

    Quotes just don’t belong in emails.

    Also: write emails first THEN plop in addresses.

    1. jane's nemesis*

      to be fair, I’ve never seen recalling an email actually WORK. At my old job, my boss loved to recall emails with the tiniest typos that she’d notice after she sent, but all it did was send a notice that “jane wants to recall this email” which just made people who hadn’t read it yet go look for the error she was recalling over. Embarrassing!

      2. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

        My favorite Groucho Marx quote:

        “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

  124. Adereterial*

    Our signatures have to be bilingual English and Welsh… no excuses. Except lots of people don’t speak Welsh fluently enough to translate what are often pretty technical job titles and other info. We have a translation team for that reason, who have a bilingual auto-response for short requests of up to a few sentences – it’s short, just ‘thank you for your email. All requests will be actioned within 3 days’ with the Welsh first, the English second.

    You can probably tell where this is going…

    A member of my team – new to the organisation and to bilingual working – needed her job title and working pattern translated. She sent it as 2 sentences, got back the auto-response beginning ‘Diolch am eich neges’ and didn’t read any further. And I didn’t notice for weeks, that her job title was ‘Data apprentice/Thank you for your email’ and her working pattern was ‘Monday to Friday/All requests will be actioned within 3 days’.

    Oooops.

  125. Helen*

    I worked with a supplier whose standard organization signature block included their tagline of “Professionalism Defines [Members of our Organization]!” … but then the employee had added their own personal tagline of “If I didn’t tell you … then it must be NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!”

  126. Nesprin*

    A fresh one from today- one of my safety guys put an icon for a safety award in is signature block.
    I got curious since I hadn’t heard of this award before- turns that this award that he’s listing as his was received by my 10k person company.

    1. Miss Muffet*

      Is he saying this is his personal award? It’s pretty common for people to put the images for like, Best Places to Work or USNews Top 10 Hospital (etc) in their sig, just like they might put the corp logo in their sig. It’s understood to be the company’s, and if he’s a safety guy and it’s a safety award, it’s pretty relevant.

      1. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

        I agree to some extent. My org got a Best Places To Work designation and we were all encouraged to add a provided icon to our email.

        How weird the safety award is depends on the company business; if they are in an industry where workplace safety is a hot issue, like nuclear power plant or mining, or their product is safety equipment like fire extinguishers, then it makes sense to include the award. But if the business is, for instance textbooks, that’s weird.

  127. mol106*

    Not work email, but seen in the wilds of the internet:
    “No trees were harmed in the sending of this message. However, a few electrons were terribly inconvenienced.”

  128. OldHITGuy*

    I worked with a surgeon who had a signature in their clinical notes that read something to the effect of: “this note entered and stored electronicaly on a computer, I assume no responsibility for the accuracy of the contents”. Legal and risk management really didn’t like that statement!

    1. PsychNurse*

      No responsibility for the contents, lol! At the deposition: “Didn’t you write these notes yourself, doctor?”

  129. ThursdaysGeek*

    I don’t use a signature block, but often just sign a dash and my first initial, lower case: -k. Or my name, but still lower case.

    But, I have one co-worker where I misunderstood her email one time, and I thought she was calling me ‘Bubbles’. Which I told her, and now I always sign emails from her as Bubbles, and include a picture of some animal blowing bubbles, from snakes to elephants. She, of course, does call me Bubbles now, and includes a picture as well.

  130. Kevin v*

    Not the signature content that was a problem but: A bunch of co-workers used a custom font delivered with an application used by their department (only) in their email signatures. Outlook, used by most of our clients & us, would substitute in Wingdings (WHY!?) for the font. Employees would get emails back “why does your email sig look like a bunch of gobbledygook?” But the reply maintained the original font setting so it looked fine to the co-workers. Even if they copied the signature and pasted into word or a new email it would retain the original font name so would appear fine on any machine that had that font installed.

    After several rounds of email font “who’s on first?” Somebody sent a screenshot. Use of that font in email was stopped.

  131. Jackie Daytona*

    Years ago I worked for a white woman who ran an organization and had a generic positive quote in her signature that was attributed to: ” -Native American proverb”

    It is unfortunately so common that random sayings get taken out of context and nobody does the work to find out who really said them, and even if it did come from a particular First Nation or leader, that information is stripped down or missing.

    This is already annoying enough, but the worst part of her signature was the discrepancy with her actions. We were required to have a racially and otherwise diverse board (age, gender, etc.), and on multiple occasions I heard her count and state there were a certain number of people of color on the board (by her own opinion, not from actual data requested from members), and EVERY time she excluded counting the one Native American member. It was common knowledge that this was part of the board member’s identity – she shared many parts of her life on social media, and we were all connected. And she continued to have that part of her identity erased and be misrepresented as white by a person who’s every email included appropriation of Native culture.

      1. Gina*

        (Uhhh looking at this comment on my desktop I see a very different emoji than the one I attempted to add, which was a face palm….? Sorry!)

  132. MicroBioChic*

    One of the folks who approves our POs had Merry CHRISTmas!!!! with CHRISTmas in bold red all through December.

    That was fun.

  133. Rage*

    Does anybody follow the Villain Support Network on TikTok or FB? I’m going to put “Have an Acme Day” in my signature (followed by, in teeny tiny subscript, the disclaimer “Have an Acme Day is a registered trademark of the Acme Corporation. Having an Acme Day will be retroactively billed to your account. Have an Acme Day.”)

  134. RT*

    OK, this isn’t inappropriate but it is funny: A lawyer’s signature line that says “If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.”

  135. Noncompliance Specialist*

    This thread is giving me horrible flashbacks to my previous role which included branding for my organization. I was in charge of ‘designing’ and enforcing email signatures and it was a constant battle to get people to follow the instructions. Nothing as bad as the stories people shared, but like constant, “No you don’t need your typed out email address in your email signature” and “No one needs you to increase the font size 4x on your email signature, people can increase the zoom level”. I gave up eventually for all but the worst offenders but what a bunch of ridiculous arguments.

  136. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

    An employee who I replaced at a previous job had set her email to forward to the group inbox when she left, and had also set up an autoreply explaining that she was no longer with the company and that the email was being forwarded to the team. The signature line read “Onwards and DEFINITELY upwards,” and I still giggle over it.

  137. AJ*

    The BEST one I ever saw was surrounding the World Cup. “I’m currently unable to get to my email right this second. Why? I’m on a trip fully immersed in the World Cup experience and enjoying the much needed vitamin d escaping the cold and gray weather of Northern Europe.”

  138. Generic Name*

    I know someone whose email signature is: “*emotion* unlocks *action*” and I am just so baffled by it. I think this person must think it’s meaningful/profound, but I find it inane to the point of being almost meaningless. To me it’s like saying, “We feel stuff and then we do things”, and just, what? I guess I’m not erudite enough to get this.

  139. frustrated trainee*

    “Mr. Flibble, king of the potato people”

    I get that it’s a reference and remember liking Red Dwarf but haven’t seen it in ages. Still, an odd choice to put in your signature when applying for a job with a Fortune 500 company!

  140. toadflax*

    A younger sibling who worked IT help desk jobs (and hated them) in their early 20s had email signatures that were variations on “My job would be a lot easier if you weren’t so stupid.” After seeing one that was especially bad–I was concerned they could actually be fired over it–I finally suggested that it might be better if they didn’t do this.

  141. Anon anon*

    I work as a DoD contractor, and there are sooo many people in that and affiliated communities who love to include Latin phrases in their signature blocks. Not sure why, but I eyeroll so hard at those.

  143. Baron*

    Question: I have a (cis male) colleague who, in the place where everyone in my organization puts their pronouns, has:
    I AM

    What…what even is that? Is that something?

      1. Baron*

        Yeah, I figured. I’m not familiar with it as, like, A Thing That Transphobes Say, because thankfully I’m not that familiar with the things transphobes say, but generally the guy has huge Carrie’s-mom energy.

    2. Lady_Lessa*

      “I AM”, according to the Hebrew Scriptures is the name that God told Moses to use. I think that it is somewhere in Genesis.

      So, your colleague (hopefully playfully) is claiming to be God.

    3. Cat*

      In the category of replies to probably not make but to entertain privately, maybe ask AM if I could provide the extended version of the pronoun set (equivalent to expanding he/him to he/him/his/his/himself or she/her to she/her/her/hers/herself)

  144. D.W.*

    A city manager in a city I used to work for had the oath from the Athenian City-State in his email signature…
    We will never bring disgrace on this our City by an act of dishonesty or cowardice.

    We will fight for the ideals and Sacred Things of the City both alone and with many.

    We will revere and obey the City’s laws, and will do our best to incite a like reverence and respect in those above us who are prone to annul them or set them at naught. 

    We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public’s sense of civic duty.

    Thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this City not only, not less, but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us

    2. hiyojun guy*

      this comment really startled me because my high school’s school song (which i still have memorised, against my will) was this oath set to music, so i thought this signature was a lot more region-specific than it is for a sec ^^”

  145. Kaye*

    I had a colleague who had a perfectly normal signature until she got married. Then she put (Mrs) after her name. We were an extremely informal organization where everyone, staff and clients alike, were on first name terms, so I’m not sure there was ever any likelihood of somebody calling her ‘Miss’.

    1. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

      This may be regional, I don’t know, but both Mrs. and Miss are just out of fashion in my opinion. It’s Ms. for someone who is female, if it has to be listed at all.

  146. BoxOfficeShenanigans*

    Got an email once from an irate customer chewing us out for enforcing a policy he was completely in the wrong about – intermittent all-caps shouting, aggressive sarcasm, calling us names, insulting our intelligence…his signature included a quote about the value of being kind and extending the benefit of the doubt. You can be sure his message went on our Customer Wall of Shame.

  147. nmitford*

    With regard to the misspellings (analist for analyst), I can’t tell you how many Agile software development guys I’ve encountered who leave the “r” out of Scrum Master and, thus, dub themselves Scum Masters. “Scum” is on my list of words to search for before a proposal goes out, along with that old standby, “pubic,” and a few others.

    1. Khatul Madame*

      Probably as many people with the title of Principal spell it as “Principle” in their signature, resume, LinkedIn profile…
      HOW? I mean, this is a senior title and presumably requires a certain level of literacy…

      1. Generic Name*

        Ha, I caught that exact typo when I recently got new business cards. It went through at least 3 rounds of review and I didn’t catch it until they were printed out and I was looking at them in my hand.

  148. Destroyer of Typos*

    I had a boss who had a quote from themselves in their signature too! It was more odd than anything else and they had a lot of other strange email habits….

  149. Spelling is fun*

    This isn’t overly weird/inappropriate, but I completed an audit for a provider and my contact there had his job title spelled incorrectly in his signature. He was the Quality Management Director so one would think his attention to detail would be better. I so badly wanted to bring it up at the end of the review but couldn’t think of a nice way to do so! Can’t believe anyone at his own organization would never point this out to him.

  151. Em*

    I worked with a client that had a high resolution picture of their golden retriever in a life jacket on their signature line. It took up the full screen. It wasn’t inappropriate, just silly, especially on longer threads where I had to scroll past it five times. Cute dog, though!

  152. daffodil*

    It used to be common in christian nonprofits for people to include a bible verse reference but not the actual text (John 3:16, for instance). My family used to joke about finding verses that were either mundane, perplexing or weird out of context and see how long it took someone to look it up. Like Nehemiah 6:8 “I sent him this reply: ‘Nothing like what you are saying is happening; you are just making it up out of your head.'”

  153. Lizzy B*

    Early in career signatures included:
    “Technically correct is the best kind of correct.”
    “Because it’s written, that’s why.”
    No they weren’t professional, but they made me laugh anyway and that was enough for me.

    2. Danish*

      my early career sig that entertained ME at least was “if you can’t learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly”. It’s a philosophy I can still get behind!

  154. SkunkPunter*

    Any other Jorts The Cat fans here want to join me in adding “the softest paw can be a claw” to our signatures? Bonus points if your company isn’t unionized (if in US).

  155. NC Kat 75*

    When we started using MS Outlook in Old Company (we started with Lotus Notes), a coworker used teddy bears in her signature, and no one complained until then-boss left and New Boss came on board. Teddy bears were replaced with the standard sig, but the coworker complained bitterly for months. I had the cubicle next to her, and I could hear mutter every time she sent an email. It was entertaining until it got boring. I guess she got tired of it because she stopped muttering a couple of months later. She got away with a lot, even treating retirees brusquely when they would call with benefits questions. She was terminated a few years later when the complaints got too much for management to ignore.

  157. Brrrr*

    We have a customer that used to include a photo of his latest calf (baby cow, not lower leg) after his email signature. Not a little thumbnail size picture, but one that took up half the screen. The calves were always very cute, and he would change up the photo every once in a while so you’d see the calf a little older, or with its mother, and then the next year a picture of a different baby cow.

    We don’t work in agriculture, farming, ranching, veterinary, animal rescue, or any industry that would be related to farm animals. They were cute pics though and some of my colleagues looked forward to seeing them!

    1. starsaphire*

      I just have to say, I love the fact that there was a need to clarify after the word “calf,” because having read AAM, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a dude who lifts would be sending out progress shots of various muscles just, y’know, at random.

      Thank you for the awesome laugh! :)

  158. LMM*

    I once got reamed by a manager for sending an email (in 2009, maybe? iPhones were newish but I work in media and they were pretty ubiquitous even then) from my iPhone because I was running late to work due to a train delay. It had that “sent from my iPhone” signature that’s built in. He told me it was unprofessional to email from my phone and to never do it again.

    Maybe two months later, he got an iPhone and every email from him also contained the signature. I’ve never used it since.

  159. PC Instructor*

    When iPhones were still newer and not something almost everybody had, my niece shared a Tumblr post with me about someone who realized their friends had changed their iPhone name to Nazi, so they were sending out resumes with the signature “Sent from Nazi’s iPhone” unknowingly. I shared this with my skeptical college Professional Communications class. The next week a student emailed me from her phone with the signature line “Sent from Queen Bitch’s iPhone.” I didn’t call her out in class, but did mention to the class that at least one of them had an inappropriate signature line and that if they were using an iPhone they should email themselves to see what the signature line was. I didn’t get anymore emails from her with that signature line.

    1. NotBatman*

      I hate that some email apps still do that. It’s invasive, giving the recipient information they don’t actually need in an effort to force Apple product placement, and it’s hard for the sender to notice and control.

  160. dog lady emails*

    Working in customer service, I once had a customer with 3 pictures of her INCREDIBLY adorable beagle on her first, second, and third birthday in her email signature. I emailed answering her question, and added that I loved her dog and had shown all my coworkers her pictures. She sent back a fourth birthday update picture! It was a huge distraction in her email, but it brought the whole office so much joy.

  161. Cinderblock*

    My personal email signature is in Comic Sans and says “Using Comic Sans ironically since 1998.”

  162. H.C.*

    NGL – for a few months in my default out of office signature, I had “PUBIC RELATIONS” instead of “public relations.” It wasn’t when I substantially updated the OOO (instead of just mindlessly replacing the dates I’ll be out & date I’ll be returning) that I caught it and wished a hellmouth would swallow me up. (I also wondered if my professional contacts not noticed at all, or if they did and were too polite/uncomfortable to point it out.)

    And yep, can totally relate to Alexis in that one ep of Schitt’s Creek!

  163. Shay*

    We had an intern with the following quote in his signature, in the font Impact:

    “We Be Ballin’. Don’t Let Nobody Tell You Otherwise!”

    Immediately following this, he attributed the quote to himself and added a year. The year was the year he was born.

  164. MissAnon*

    ~*~ Your lack of planning is not my emergency ~*~

    ^ This was a veteran coworker’s email signature and although I agree it was not professional, I found it rather amazing ^

    1. Curmudgeon in California*

      I wish I could put that in my email signature at work. Because we get a lot of last minute garbage, that people have to have known about for weeks, but didn’t think anyone else needed to know until the day before a major holiday weekend…

  166. Yikes*

    Employee sent emails from their personal phone but with their work email address (pretty normal at my work). Emails from his phone had a default signature stating support/belief in/membership of QAnon. This was before QAnon was as widely know as it now so it took awhile for management to shut it down.

    1. Zombeyonce*

      Even taking away the grossness of the group, the premise of putting that you’re a member of a specific group that probably has zero relevance to your message in your signature for every email doesn’t even make sense. But neither do QAnon people, so…

  167. SoSleepy*

    I’m an admin with very few things that people can’t do on their own. The last time I went out of town for 1-2 days I told my friend colleagues that I was going to put “If you’re having an emergency, please don’t.” I didn’t put that, just the generic OOO with when to expect me back.

    It will be better when I go out for 2+ weeks this year and hopefully by then my backup will be back from sick leave so they can take care of the few things that have limited access…

  168. Rob aka Mediancat*

    I had a co-worker once actually set their out-of-office message to say that they were going to be in pot for the week.

  169. My Name is Mudd*

    My office received notice that our branch was closing the following month. I was broke, really broke, and about to be unemployed. So I continued to come to the office to use their utilities and be part of the “closing team.” I spent that month dealing with suppliers and cancelling orders, ending each email with “While I will miss working with everyone, I will miss you most of all. Hugs & Kisses, My Name is Mudd”

  170. ProfP*

    Not offensive in any way, but I’m baffled by the guy whose every email ends:
    Best wishes
    Many happy returns
    – [his name]

    I’ve concluded that he has no idea what “Many happy returns” means

  171. DreddPirate*

    The business owner who had a quirky sense of humor at a former job of mine used to have “General Overall Director (GOD)” as part of his email sig.

  172. math*

    When I was in high school I had my signature as an Isaac Asimov quote – “Those who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” Eugh!

    I am very thankful I got rid of it before I started applying to colleges/jobs

  173. Heh*

    “Je le ferai (Will do)!” – “Trop facile (Too Easy)!”

    “We will only grasp the staggering potential of our time if we create onramps that empower ALL people to participate, regardless of background, country of origin, religious practice, gender, or color of skin.” – ROBERT F. SMITH (American billionaire, philanthropist, chemical engineer, investment banker, Husband/Father of five children and Brother of Alpha Phi Alpha, Fraternity, Inc.)

    Both in the same signature. The first part is random? And I like the quote/sentiment for the second part but the father of five children and fraternity part is super strange.

  174. Ann*

    My co-worker is a bronie (an adult male who love my little pony). He has a hand drawn pony that was designed to look like him in his signature. It actually reflects his personality well.

    1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I have one of those (for me, obviously) from a convention framed on my office wall.

  175. Lalaluna*

    When I worked at a public library, one of our younger staff who was in college signed all their emails with their name and “Future Librarian” with a projected graduation date when they would receive their Master’s in Library science. IIRC, they were not currently in grad school, they were still getting their undergrad, so the projected future graduation date was years away….

    2. mrs kravitz*

      I work in a library and someone – who is not a librarian – has added “MLIS” to their email signature. Not even librarians do this.

  176. anxiousGrad*

    One of my professors in college had this as her email signature: “God says, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ – Joshua 1:5.” What made it particularly uncomfortable was that she was a professor in a field related to working with people in low resource settings, so there’s unfortunately a history of missionaries getting involved in these things.

  177. Numbat*

    I’ve seen a wedding one! From a staff member of a very senior government minister. It was a link to her upcoming wedding, complete with countdown, engagement photos, the works. It was so bizarre.

  178. TMI*

    I work for a large retail company and one of the brands we deal with encourages their employees to put quirky statements in their email signature, such as what their favourite toy is. Sounds fine in theory, but perhaps not so much when your brand is known for selling a variety of lingerie and NSFW items.
    Apparently the person I was dealing with was a fan of a particularly well-known item with a name like “exuberant small mammal”

  179. Wendy the Spiffy*

    My favorite — and clearly intended tongue-in-cheek — was from a guy I worked with last year, let’s call him John Frank. His sig (with way better formatting than I can do in this comment):
    “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take — Wayne Gretzky’
    — Michael Scott”
    — John Frank

  180. Anonomatopoeia*

    Ones that make fun of pronouns. Like,

    Jeremiah Bullfrog
    Director, Frog Think Tank
    Pronouns hotstuff/heybaby/hubbahubba

    1. Nea*

      I have seen screenshots of people making fun of pronouns because they automatically assume that all such things are written in English. So they make fun of er/ihm or hij/hem for example. (Both of those are he/him, in German and Dutch respectively)

  181. Mmmmmarianne*

    I work at a county agency, where you are encouraged to take MANY county-sponsored courses, one being some sort of personality driven nonsense. The employees who take it come away with different adjectives, which they add to their email signatures, think: achiever, blah blah, and one is relator, which I always read as ‘realtor’, and think, ‘damn, that person is a realtor, too, in addition to their county job’ !which could totally track). – and then remember’ oh, right, personality quiz’. Yeah, I avoid those classes like the plague.

  182. Orbital*

    Not an email signature, but an IM service status: “Poor quality will be remembered long after the pleasure of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.” I don’t know if that’s actually a quote from someone or what, but it just makes me think they don’t care about deadlines.

    1. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

      I mean, this person is not wrong – some of the worst products and bugs I’ve seen created began their existence with the words “I have committed and communicated it to the stakeholders that this feature will be in production on X day.” I know that true drop-dead, non-negotiable completion dates do exist, but they are a lot more rare than we are led to believe.

    2. allathian*

      Mmm yeah. When our former more or less custom-coded intranet was launched about 5 years ago, the project had a really firm deadline and they were forced to release what was essentially a buggy beta version. Although it improved a lot later on, users were really unhappy with it and many refused to use it unless they absolutely had to.

      Last year we switched to MS SharePoint, and while that’s far from perfect, the number of complaints has gone way down because it worked better than what we had before straight out of the box.

  183. LawBee*

    The insurance adjuster who set the following as her email sig during June (Aka Gay Pride Month in the US):

    A picture of the so-called straight pride flag
    “Married to my HUSBAND for 29 years and counting!” (The adjuster is a woman)
    Changed the colors of the “[Company name] STRONG” logo to the straight pride colors.

    Every email from her felt like a punch in the stomach. She changed it back to the normal boring signature on July 1.

      1. LawBee*

        It went out to everyone. I couldn’t really do anything about it because I didn’t want to negatively impact my clients. I’m a gay attorney. Her deliberate sig change was such an unnecessarily mean thing to do.

    3. ICodeForFood*

      That’s awful! Sorry you had to read it (probably repeatedly)… and can you bring it up to HR?

    4. Curmudgeon in California*

      Wow, what a b!tch! She just HAD to blatantly push against LGBTQIA in the one month that was for Pride. Sheesh!

      I probably would have brought that up to HR. It’s fine if she doesn’t celebrate Pride, but she doesn’t need to spew nasty backlash against those that do.

    5. The Prettiest Curse*

      What an absolute bigoted arsehole. Sorry that you had to deal with this awful person.

  184. Thorn*

    To be clear, I think this is funny and not off putting: a manager at my company would change her internal out of office signature to rousing speeches from fantasy movies and books. We had external signatures separately, so only employees saw these. Gandalf, Spider-Man, who ever.

    “We must face the long dark of Moria. There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.

  185. WingedRocks*

    Maybe I am a grump – but anything other than basic info is off-putting. Pronouns, name, title, contact info – all good. I don’t see the point in adding flair to a signature

  186. Thorn*

    I worked with a dude whose signature line was “Only the lead dog gets a change of scenery” at an org that lists “collaboration” as its core value.

  187. Turner*

    I once got an out of office reply from a colleague that said she had been abducted by aliens and was fighting her way back to Earth. She was in the process of transitioning out after the new board chair put the organization in a questionable new strategic direction, and I think she was just over it.

  188. AdArchangel*

    I had an absolutely ridiculous OOO response + salutation come through when I was dealing with a super stressful invoicing issue. Still makes me cringe to this day because of how absolutely flippant it seemed in the context of what I was dealing with.

    “Hello Traveler,

    You have reached my inbox but I am out of the office and into the woods. I’ll be taking some time away to rest and reflect and reconnect with nature. “Dude McBroseph [his name, referring to himself in the third person]” will return next month and will likely be happy to help you out then. In the meantime, all you need is A) Inside you already or B) with one of the people listed below:

    [Contact info omitted]

    Here’s the list of books I am bringing with me on my trip into the mountains!

    die trying,

    firstinitial lastinitial

    1. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

      Dear lord.

      “all you need is inside you already”
      “die trying,”

      What an embarrassment of riches this OOO message is!

      1. AdArchangel*

        “Hello Traveler” was what really got me. Like, dude, I’m sitting at my laptop trying to undo your company’s mess. Ugh.

    2. Cathie from Canada*

      When I was experiencing a painful infected root canal, I found out that my dentist’s office used an hilarious “Bogart” imitation voice for their voice mail message. It didn’t tell me what day or time they would be open again, nor did they provide any references for patients to call during emergencies.
      Needless to say, I was NOT amused.
      And I switched dentists, too.

  189. Alex*

    I once used an old email from my boss as a forward to someone else, copying my boss. It was for a completely innocent reason–I was just needing some of the info in the email but was adding some of my own text, etc., and was trying to save time.

    I wasn’t careful enough and accidentally sent the email with my boss’s signature still in it, such that it looked like I had my boss’s signature as my own signature.

    Queue my boss DM’ng me “WTF”. Oops!

  190. squirreltooth*

    When I was in college, I was a student worker in Human Resources and started signing my emails to my supervisors as Director of Robot Resources with my name in “robot style”—think instead of Monica Gellar, Monmecha Gellgear. They must have gotten a kick out of it, because they kept me there for all four years.

  191. Mr. Bob Dobalina*

    There are still way too many people out there with this kind of thing in their signature…

    “Sent from my smart phone. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.”

    That was annoying from the get-go, but is incredibly annoying now.

    2. squirreltooth*

      I think that’s handy to know, actually. It’s also autogenerated much of the time, so the user might not know how to turn it off.

    3. VaguelySpecific*

      For a long time I had “typed with 2 thumbs on a sheet of glass” in my (personal) email signature.

    4. From the Gecko*

      A bit off topic, but I saw a video with someone who thought the phrase is, “From the gecko,” instead of “from the get-go.” I kind of love that

  192. Kimberly*

    Multiple with political opinions and/or religious quotes. We worked for a public school. Having to explain repeatedly that No I won’t support them when they got written up because at school they are the state and bound by the establishment clause.

    I have to say most of the teachers did understand they were the state or at least got it when I pointed it out. It was mostly a group that belonged to one of two powerful hate churches (alliances to white supremacist, misogynist, or anti-LGBIQA + groups) that swore up and down they were being persecuted bc Christians are at such a disadvantage in rural Texas.

  193. Danish*

    When I worked for Big Tech Company there were very strict rules about 1: what could be in your signature and 2: what you could do with the company logo

    a brand new hire made herself a custom banner for her signature that was a dragon on a pile of gold, with a life-affirming quote in papyrus, with the company logo slapped on there with an additional line about How Cool It Was To Work For Company.

    it was cringe and embarrassing but also a bit charming, and you feel a little bad calling someone to the carpet for their deep enthusiasm for their job.

  194. R*

    Finally my chance to tell the world about the grossest, slimiest team of people I’ve ever had the displeasure of having to work with, one of whom had an email address with a pun in his mother tongue that roughly translated into “disgusting/massive_balls” at whatever dot com.

  195. Azure Jane Lunatic*

    I became involved with this at step 4.

    Step 1: A client with a very nice quote signature wrote in for technical help.
    Step 2: An unnamed co-worker started their technical response “Dear Frederick Douglass, …”
    Step 3: The client wrote back.

    I referred it up to a supervisor to brief my colleague on what signature files are, the importance of reading the whole email, and of course, who Frederick Douglass was. Then I apologized, thanked the client for their gracious explanation, and let them know that my co-worker now understood more about the life and work of this important abolitionist.

    3. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

      This is funny/cringe…but at the same time, never discount that a person may indeed have a name that is also a famous/historical name. I’ve had clients named Diana Ross, Leroy Brown, and Jean Poole…

      1. Zombeyonce*

        I wonder how many times poor Leroy has introduced himself only for people to start singing that he’s bad. I know it’s stuck in my head now.

        1. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

          His email was badbadleroybrown…I think he’s proudly owning his name.

      2. Azure Jane Lunatic*

        There was no such doubt with this customer: there was a signoff with a name largely matching the name on the account a bit above the Frederick Douglass quote.

    4. mrs kravitz*

      I super super cringe at myself remembering when, back in the 90’s, at the beginning of the internet era, I thought that the person I was corresponding to via email was named “Steve Jobs.” Obviously I knew nothing of email signatures with quotes, nor of Steve Jobs of Apple.

  196. cheapeats*

    At my government adjacent job, we have a government rep whose job it is to monitor us lowly contractors and make sure the gov is getting the bang for its beaucoup bucks. This rep has not appeared onsite since Covid hit (the team doing the work is onsite), he never speaks in meetings, and he sends maaaybe one email a year. So it’s hard to tell, but i don’t think the govt is getting the bang for the buck for his salary.

    His email signature? “An accountable leader who inspires”

  197. Gina*

    My awful boss had “Namaste.” For no apparent reason. We’d get emails in the first month of the pandemic like:

    “Remember, each moment you spend taking care of your child is a moment you aren’t working, so be sure to clock out. Also as a reminder you are NOT guaranteed a break for lunch and that INCLUDES WHEN YOU ARE WORKING FROM HOME.”

    – Cersei
    ✨Namaste ☺️✨

    1. Curmudgeon in California*

      Wow!!

      I work as a contractor. My agency has a line on our timecards that is something like:

      I certify that I’m familiar with [Agency]’s Meal and Rest Period Policy. The policy provides for meal and rest periods that I’m entitled, encouraged and expected to take. Clients must adhere to [Agency]’s policy.

      I certify I’ve checked the Missed Meal box for any Missed, Late, or Short Meal Period when I wasn’t relieved of all duty or was impeded or discouraged from taking a meal period.

      I certify I’ve reported to my [Agency] manager, the [branch] director or Customer Service at [phone number] or [specific.email@agency.com] all instances when I wasn’t provided or was impeded or discouraged from taking a meal period or rest period.

      IOTW, our contract agency people ARE “guaranteed a break for lunch” and we get in trouble for not taking a lunch, and it will blow back to the client if they keep us from having lunch.

      Your boss sucked.

      1. Gina*

        Wow! That’s amazing to see. And yes, she 100% sucked. (Wanna know the kicker? The nonprofit I worked for was in the field of food access. You can’t make it up.)

    2. SMH*

      What makes it even “better” is that “Namaste” doesn’t even actually mean what modern (usually white, or at least non-Hindu) yoga instructors use it as.

      Whatever its roots or archaic usage once was, these days, it just means “hello.” That’s it. Which makes it especially nonsensical as a closing. It’s the equivalent of saying “Goodbye” at the start of something because it once meant “God be with ye.”

  198. BradleysGiggleBall*

    One of execs has “Excelsior!” in his email signature, which he forgot to remove in his email announcing layoffs.

  199. Another JD*

    A signature with a too sexy photo on emails that I had to produce to the court for a custody matter. Your kids’ school, doctor, and the judge don’t want to see your bra, and neither do I.

  200. StellaPDX*

    I have a co-worker who puts in correspondence with clients and internal employees the “Happy National “fill in the blank” day”. It is so unprofessional and comes off very weird.
    For example: Hello Client, Happy National Black Cat Day! Your account is overdue for maintenance..
    I cringe every time I see an email from him.

  201. AnneMoliviaColemuff*

    Someone I know rents through a small agency, and received an email from their agent. In the signature where pronouns often are, they had “proudly heterosexual, and NOT a They/Them”.

    1. Zombeyonce*

      It’s almost laughably ignorant, like sexuality has anything to do with pronouns. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      Well, isn’t he just so special! The fact that he doesn’t know cis from het is just the yellow icing on the sh*t cake.

      I might be tempted to always refer to that person in the unknown singular just to be nasty.

      1. allathian*

        Nah, I read it as a “I’m neither gay nor trans, so there you freaks!” or something.

        The homo-transphobia is strong in this one.

  202. Italian*

    “Sent from the phone you wish you had.”
    Not only the most obnoxious signature I have seen, but the most obnoxious person I have ever met.

    2. ecnaseener*

      I’d be so tempted to take him at face value and respond, “You’ve got a working phone the size of an iPhone SE, with a headphone jack? What model is it, I can’t find it anywhere!”

  203. The Leanansidhe*

    My boss works in academia and as a clinical doctor. His email signature is EIGHTEEN lines, including multiple departments he has taught in, societies he used to be a part of or lead but isn’t anymore (think Former VP of X Journal), and titles for academic teaching awards he has received. It’s practically a CV and makes scrolling down email chains he is a part of pretty cumbersome. I’ve elected to be amused.

    1. The Leanansidhe*

      And bonus content– I needed said boss to electronically sign a form I sent. His full name was on the form. He added a white-fill text box over his full name on the form to correct it from [Full Name] to [Prof. of Dept. Full Name]

  204. Peter Pan*

    For awhile my team and I were emailing with someone who had the following statement pasted below their name and contact information. #awkward

    Please read in its entirety and reply “Acknowledged​,​” upon receiving. Disclaimer: Failure to respond acknowledgement of this email does not excuse one from not being informed. Reading emails are part of your position. You are responsible for the contents of this email and completion of tasks.

  207. Quinalla*

    Usually nothing in the signatures too bad – sometimes eye searing font colors or hard to read font choices – but the backgrounds, for some reason I see these far too often. So obnoxious and not straightforward to delete them out when you reply/forward. Makes me long for text-based email only, though with so many reading/writing emails on phones, I feel like it has gotten a little better in recent years with less garbage in email signatures/emails.

  208. joriley*

    Not work-related, but there was a brief period c. 2010 when you could add an automatic signature to your text messages. I was in high school, so inevitably I mostly saw it used by teen girls to refer to their boyfriends. Whenever I would get a text from one of my friends it would end with ~Lloyd’s Llady~ and another person I knew ended hers with with “He’s my penguin <3"

    1. AnneMoliviaColemuff*

      This was also a thing in my high school era – 2003ish. It was also the time before PINs on phones were commonplace, so a popular prank was to change someone’s signature to “I love you” and cause some mischief.

    2. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      My old smartwatch had about 5 custom text lines that you could push a button or two and reply to an incoming text. Mine were, as I recall, Yes, Okay, No, On my way, and Call me.

      I added “Sent from my [brand, not Apple] smartwatch” to the end of all of them, less as a brag and more as an advisory that I was likely not in a position to respond promptly, or with anything more than those five canned messages.

  209. Sammy*

    A customer of mine from a government agency had a picture of his car. Not a great picture, not a fancy car, and there is a little blurb under the picture that says “Dave – 2006”.
    The guy in question was not called Dave so I am assuming that is the name of his car.

  210. Teacher’s wife*

    My husband was a theater teacher. A number of his fellow theater teachers had, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” From Midsummer Night’s Dream in their signature lines.
    I always wondered if they noticed that so many of them were emailing this to each other…

  211. Teacher of Art*

    I’m not sure this counts, but I work in a public school and our principal’s email signature says “Your optimism today will determine your level of success tomorrow.” The toxic positivity irks me every time I get an email from her.

  212. ReadMeAnything*

    From a US government employee in an email regarding a military product procurement request:
    “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” -Kamala Harris

    It was off-putting to see a business/government signature making fun of a sitting VP.

  213. ER*

    Not so much a signature as a whole email aesthetic, but in one job, I had fairly regular correspondence with someone whose emails were written in blue comic sans and whose signature was written in pink comic sans. It was… something.

  214. reality check please*

    1. One guy I work with occasionally signs all of his emails “THANKS…” and then has a picture of his memoji giving a double thumbs-up underneath. Cracks me up every time. He’s very high up in emergency services at our stuffy government organization, and it’s so out of synch with our culture.

    2. When I was in college, many of the student affairs professionals I worked with in my RA job had their StrengthsFinder Top Five in their email signatures. The reslife department made everyone do StrengthsFinder, and some of the staff thought this would be useful/interesting information to have in their email signature somehow? Even as a 19 year old with very limited professional experience, I could tell this was…a choice.

  215. Happytoglad*

    Throughout the pandemic, the office manager of a very senior government person had 2 Chronicles 7:13-14 as her signature which in case you didn’t go to the Church of Fire and Brimstone is

    “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

    It was also had multicolored font, an eagle, and underlines. She would send it out to emails with thousands of people on it. So many people were baffled why this was never addressed.

  216. tiredlibrarian*

    When I was a federal government contractor, one of the contractors I worked with (different company/different office) signed all of his emails with “Blue Skies”. Like “Blue Skies, John”. It was so random – got to the point that we internally would just call him “blue skies”. :)

  217. Simplicity Jones*

    My favourite was of an ex-colleague’s from 10+ years ago.

    At that time, it was popular to print out emails to bring to meetings, take notes on them, etc. Company messaging to the public was on how the corporation was looking after the environment, specifically with its focus on the importance of water. Many leaders/senior management had signatures that included a version of: “Please help me save the environment. Don’t print this email unless you really have to.”

    My colleague decided to have some fun, and changed his signature to include: “Please help me kill the environment by printing this email.” He kept the green font and had the little tree next to it. The works. If you didn’t **read** his revised signature, you’d never know it was different.

    This was bad enough on its own, despite it going under the management radar for a few days (it may have been longer- I forget), but there happened to be a ‘reply all’ go around not too long after he changed his signature. My colleague decided to jump in on the reply-all email chain after “My cat’s breath smells like cat food” was sent to thousands of employees include the CEO. He replied-all in 72 point RED BOLDED font with “THIS IS AWESOME!!” Included in his THIS IS AWESOME was his signature of “please help me kill the environment by printing this email.”

    The proverbial crap hit the fan. He was not only hauled in front of the manager for the ‘reply-all’, but then subsequently hauled in again not 5 minutes later for his signature as it had somehow eluded management during the first hauling-in. He also got an email from a very senior manager about replying-all to the reply-all.

    He managed to survive the fall-out, but I guess he’d had enough of corporate culture at that point as he left the company soon after.

  218. Gone Far Away*

    I worked for a tourist attraction that was very proud of its history, so much so that one of our HR people in their email signature: “[Place Name] Where everything unpleasant is eliminated.”

    Which, if you knew the back story, was taken from a letter written by a friend to the owner of said attraction more than a century ago about the wonderful stay they had enjoyed at the place.

    If you didn’t know the story, it sounded like a tagline for a plumbing/sewer contractor.

  219. Sarah*

    I work in finance in an insurance company and many years ago one of the graduates used to have “Bringing finance back to the streets” on his email signature. I mean, can you imagine such a comment in an area that’s dealing with such serious stuff.

  220. MeetMoot*

    BRGDS

    I assume it was short for ‘best regards’ but it was coming from someone working at Goldman Sachs and he was already pretty rude in his email. I find initialisms to be really casual and unprofessional so that signature, combined with the guy’s tone in the email, really p*ssed me off. Even if you’re barely competent at typing it takes very little extra time to write ‘best’ or ‘best regards’.

  221. Ugh no thanks*

    I work at a nonprofit and have a colleague at another organization whose sign off is

    Stay amazed,
    [Name]

    It’s not outrageous, but I cringe every time I read it.

  222. Despairing of Humanity*

    I have a coworker who has his work email avatar as a cartoon wolf. Not in just any cartoon wolf, apparently one very strongly associated with the online Furry porn community.
    We’ve spoken amongst ourselves, and those of us in the office do think it’s a deliberate powerplay. But we’re not sure how or whether to raise it with him or our boss.

    1. I need a new name...*

      Depends on your boss.

      But the solution is probably a better policy around work email avatars, and never actually directly addressing it with him.

  223. Josephine*

    Something went wrong, I hope, with this client’s email and the company logo took up the whole email. All I could see om my screen was the logo….

  224. Leelee*

    I had one with a semi-stylised drawing of a cat. It was a big, fluffy grey cat – and it took up more space than the body of the email.

    Oh and they used comic-sans font (in electric blue), they were a lawyer with about 20 years of experience, and it was a job application at a very stuffy law firm. I loved it, really broke up the monotony of recruitment!

  225. ddddd*

    My kid’s principal has an acrostic for her name in her email signature. Principal Macey: Making Awesome Changes Educating Youth. I love it so much.

  226. yohane*

    A somewhat difficult and blunt colleague in another department had a signature when emailing from his phone that read: “Sent from my phone. Short. Typos.”

  227. A Jane*

    My ex-boss’s out of office message used to say that he was “on a course” periodically when he was away from the office and I would stand up for him when people were saying he was skiving. Until many months later when I realised that “on a course” meant “on a golf course”!!!

  228. machikoro*

    Not a signature, but I work with someone who types “Please be advised.” as a standalone sentence at the end of all her emails.

    Also with someone whose canned Outlook signature starts with “Respectfully,” which for some reason bothers me even more than the people who save “Thanks,” as part of their signature.

    1. Baron*

      “Respectfully” is pretty much exclusively used to precede something that could be taken disrespectfully; maybe at one point, it was intended as a softener, but this is so well known at this point that it pretty much always comes off as “something passive-aggressive you say before saying something disrespectful”. So it’s going to get some hackles up.

  230. friendly local auditor*

    I’m an auditor. Someone I communicated with frequently at the client used to switch out “inspirational” quotes in her email signature on a weekly basis. During the most difficult part of the audit, her quote was “There are times when you simply have to righteously hang on and outlast the devil” for over a month.

  231. Deejay*

    Not a signature, an out of office message, but the funniest one I’ve seen was from an airline.

    “I’m out of the office. If you’d like to be out of the office too, go to our website”.

  232. Jennifer*

    I worked with a park manager who had this quote from The Adaams Family movie in their email signature:
    Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc
    It means “we glady feast on those who subdue us” .
    Not exactly appropriate for a state goverment worker.

  233. Andi*

    I hate seeing Bible verses in works email signature. Unfortunately, i live in the south and this is pretty common!

  234. Baron*

    A former colleague, instead of signing off, like,

    Thanks,
    Peter

    would sign off

    Thanks,
    “Peter”

    I’ve always hoped that we one day find out this was an identity-theft situation and he was subtly trying to warn us all along.

  236. KindasortaAtheist*

    “Still learning. Still growing. God’s not finished with me yet.”

    Granted, we work at a human services agency with a strengths/growth ethos, but this signature always reminds me of something I would see on the wall at Sunday school rather than the workplace.

  237. AnotherPM*

    “I will always help if required.”

    The word choice of this coworker’s signature came across all wrong to me. In part because of her personality, it read as “I will always help if forced to.”

    1. I need a new name...*

      Yeah.

      ‘I am always available to help if needed’ is better (if that’s the true intention behind it but maybe not!)

      An interesting semantic discussion could be had around why one is better than the other. Since, on the surface, they’re basically the same.

  238. Anonymous for This*

    “…an animated unicorn leaping across page.”

    I think I would have been happy to receive an email with this addition, especially in the midst of a trying day at the office.

  239. phl123*

    I worked in child welfare. Someone who worked as an investigator had “better than some, worst than others” as the quote in his signature. That one was always a head scratcher

  240. Lou*

    When I first started as a student in a government agency, my coworkers and I were crazy unprofessional in a lot of ways. One of my friends had “guaranteed to blow your mind, every time” in her signature. We were just doing basic clerk stuff… I don’t remember what mine was; probably something equally inappropriate. The only reason I can think of hers is because I was deleting old emails recently and saw one from her.

    I still am not very professional in general but my career is doing fine. But I stopped putting quotes in my email signature.

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