there is no emoticon for what i am feeling Today I witnessed an event that I haven't seen since I was about 12. This kind of thing used to happen to 12 year olds in 1988, but for adults in the 21st century? Not so much. Yes, you guessed it, I personally witnessed a grown man being introduced to the smiley face emoticon (for an insightful review of some popular emoticons, read here). That's right, he had never seen it, never heard of it, didn't know what it was. At all. Not a clue. This is no 85 year old grandma who does nothing all day but knit, blog about it, and join BlogExplosion. This is a cubicle-slave who sits in front of a computer for hours on end, just like me.

The most logical explanation is that the real cubicle occupier has been abducted by aliens, and the man residing in the cubicle next to mine is no human, but an alien masquerading as a human, who has assumed the form of the guy who sits in the cubicle next to mine to witness various mortgage-related human activities.

But I figured out that something more sinister is going on. This man was raised in a lab by Microsoft engineers, who purposely shielded him from the colon and close parentheses keys on the keyboard as some sort of evil Microsoft experiment. To him, Shift-; is a command that sends valuable personal information from his hard drive directly to Microsoft servers for evaluation, and Shift-0 doesn't do anything. The obvious goal of this experiment is to see how well a human can survive in civilized society without ever using the smiley face emoticon.

My only fear now is that the Microsoft engineers will certainly know that the unthinkable has happened. Someone has told him about the smiley face emoticon. The experiment has failed. The ramifications of this are disastrous. And now I haven't seen this man in hours!

Oh wait, he was just in the bathroom.

This post has been brought to you by Microsoft.
  ¶ monger187 wrote this on 12/08/2004