The story behind the story

I have been fascinated to observe just how quickly emoji’s have become a part of our everyday life and communication.

It’s been interesting to see how these have become in a very short space of time an integral part of the way we communicate electronically.

It seems we are increasingly using emoji’s in our communications and finding that in general they can add colour and texture to our tweets, Facebook messages and texts. I do need to admit I am nowhere near as proficient as some people in their use, so find myself largely limited to ‘Smiley faces’, where appropriate.

So my mind being the way it is,  started wondering what it would be like if the emoji’s simply decided to ‘not play ball’ and the impact this would  have on the rest of us.

So without further ado, I give you …….

The Emoji’s take action…………………….

There is much discontent in the electronic world of communications, amongst the emoji’s as they come to realise and feel that they are not as appreciated or recognised in the same way as the words.

Particularly as, since their inception, they have been ‘patiently’ waiting to be included in the main Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries alongside the ‘words’. Unfortunately, it has become apparent that this is not going to happen anytime soon.

So it is, after much debate and discussion amongst themselves, the Emoji’s by a sizeable majority, vote to go on strike and simply remove themselves from electronic communications for a few days.

But they find even after a few days, that their ‘disappearance’ doesn’t quite have the impact they are hoping for. The ‘humans’ although initially irritated and annoyed at having their ‘emoji’s’ disappear, quickly become used to the new state of affairs and things to a large extent continue on as normal.

The Emoji’s then decide to ‘disappear’ for a few weeks………

However, this longer ‘disappearance’ is just put down to a bug, some fault in coding and whilst teams of ‘human’s hunt down the error, everyone else carries on as normal.

The emoji’s seeing this and realising that the human ‘coders’ are chasing them down, return to work, whilst they reconsider their options.

It is ‘Happy Smiley’ face who hits upon the ‘buddy up’ plan and shares this with the others. This new plan should be far more effective, as the strategy is simply for each ‘emoticon’ to pair up with its emotional opposite and each time it is selected for a message, their emotional opposite would go instead.

In other words, as ‘ Happy Smiley Face’ explains, every time someone selects  ‘me’, ‘Angry’ face would appear instead thus completely changing the tone and meaning of the message.

So it is, that with another majority vote, the ‘buddy up’ plan is put into action and the emoji’s start swopping all over the place……

• Sympathy, with laughter……..
• Hopeful, with cynical …………
• Joy, with sadness or wicked, depending on who’s available at the time………………..

You can imagine that it doesn’t take long for the humans to notice that things are going  wrong with their messages and as the action continues, miscommunication between the humans builds. Plan ‘buddy up’ really starts to take effect as relationships breakdown, friends turn on friends and all sorts of chaos ensues as messages are turned ‘upside down’.

The emoji’s seeing this devastation, seeing the misery and unhappiness their action is causing realise that their role is simply too important and decide to go back to what they know best. They decide that with or without entry into the dictionaries, their role is to facilitate human communications.

Maybe better to just create their own book, so they can continue to support communications between the humans in the only way they can.

So there you have it, until next time….

Janice Taylor

www.blueskycareerconsulting.co.uk