When we leave one job and go to another, we take the things we’ve learned with us, transferring the knowledge onward. In tech, that transference includes Slack emojis. As a documentarian, I find this aspect of our subculture fascinating.
The choice of emoji will depend on your relationship with the person you’re emoting to. Your boss might get :thumbs-up:, but your work bestie gets the :picardfacepalm:. Like text communication, tone is important. Knowing your audience and the existing relationship you have with them is paramount.
Every org has their own specific favorites, unless they’re the kind of org that doesn’t allow custom emojis, in which case… how dare you. You can tell a lot about the characteristics of a workplace by the reactions they repeat and cling to. It’s a visual language all unto itself, composed of dancing parrots, chaos Muppets and badly Photoshopped inside jokes.
I’ve collected a few standbys at each of the companies where I’ve been employed. And when it’s time to move on, they’ve come with me, in stored image files to be uploaded and introduced to a whole new group of people. Occasionally, when I’ve neglected to pull the icon and can’t easily find it in image search, I mourn for its loss, as if it were a familiar word that hung in the air unsaid, an earworm of a melody you can’t quite place or put a name to.
Here’s to you, chaos Elmo. I hope you stay with me always.
