Emotion Icons On My Radar

Today I'd like to complain about emoticons. Mostly because they look stupid and they give me neck ache turning sideways to try and fathom them, but also because they're getting more and more ridiculous.

I suppose :-) is an understandable and simple way of expressing happiness, and perhaps >:o is just about excusable, but somewhere down the line they became little more than geek art and their purpose was lost entirely. Let me introduce you, for example, to someone you might know:

*<|:{)}

In case you haven't recognised him, that's Santa up there. Obviously having a lie down.

I'm ¯\(º_o)/¯.

Maybe I'm just too old, but to me they're the chat room equivalent of when people who work in offices think they need to be posh, so they refer to the person they're talking to as 'yourself'. I've met quite a few people like that, and I even did it myself once or twice before I realised how silly I sounded. I think people do it because they hope it makes them sound professional, when really they'd sound more intelligent if they used 'yee' instead. Likewise, when people are interfacing in chatrooms and want to fit in they use emoticons, no matter how inappropriate and randomly placed. They also use LOL as a general sign of acknowledgement, even though it stands for Laugh Out Loud, which they're probably not doing.

Don't get me wrong, despite generally being the model of linguistic perfection even I'm prone to the odd conversational anomaly, like overuse of the word 'actually', but the 'yourself' thing really makes me LOL. In fact, office language in general is bizarre.

I once worked at a notable Regional Development Agency with a group of very pleasant but equally dull people (apart from one or two of them) whose jobs involved working with businesses in the North East to improve the regional economy. It seemed that they were basically employed to schmooze with Mr Tsukashiro-san, who had worked 16 hours a day for 25 years in a feng shui cubicle with no shoes on while forming a relationship with a west-facing pot plant, faithfully standing up at ten past every hour to recite the company motto and pledge to die for the cause of good quality ball-bearing lubricants, all the while dreaming of one day getting a larger cubicle, a more exotic plant, and Nissan branded slippers presented to him by the Assistant to the Managing Director in recognition of his silent and efficient service to the company.

To Mr Tsukashiro-san, good business etiquette is more important than Kylie Minogue Night at The Karaoke Express, so he's not going to take any slack talk from some Geordie roustabout over his Nescafé and sausage-on-a-stick in the planning meeting. Faced with this scenario, Modern Office Man casts aside his roots and makes a left turn into Cliché Terrace, a street where the f-word has an ASBO and a choice metaphor resides in every house waiting to liven up even the most mundane mind-mapping session. And he lives there, it seems, for the rest of his career.

During my time at the RDA, I was in a meeting, sorry, touching base with some of the key players from the Executive Corporate Regeneration Strategisation Value Added Protocols Monitoring Department to discuss primary target objectives and, no word of a lie, someone said the following:

"We'll have to tread carefully here because this is the biggest elephant and it's only got one toenail."

Well, exactly. If I hadn't been half asleep I would have choked on my crust-less salmon and goat cheese sandwich. I know that to be absolutely true because I was so gobsmacked when it was said that I wrote it down so I could remember to tell people. What could that possibly mean? I also recall someone talking about "finding the tumour and removing it rather than having to treat the cancer later" and "reading the black box after the plane crash." If we'd been doctors or pilots, fair enough, but we were plebs in polyester suits from Ciro Citterio talking about a spreadsheet and a pie chart. 3D, mind. But please.

Why? Why say 'close of play' when five o'clock will do? Why 'bounce ideas around' when you could talk, or even chat? Why should I 'put that on my radar?' I don't have a radar, and if I did I'd use it for something cool like spotting RAF Jet Fighters from my desk, not keeping the time of the next PowerPoint presentation on.

But in the cut-and-thrust world that exists between 9am and 5pm in tile-carpeted rooms up and down the country, image is everything. So, if your tie is from Next like everyone else's, the only way you can get ahead is via a bit of metaphorical wizardry. Who knows, a well placed USP suggestion might just be the ticket to metallic paint on your next Mondeo. Keep it up and in 15 years time maybe, just maybe, there'll be a de-badged BMW 318i waiting for yourself in the company car park.

Now that's living. ;-)