: - )

I have heard it said that you can tell anyone anything as long as you smile. I am an engineer, I think like an engineer, I react like an engineer; I am an engineer. So what does that mean? It means that I don’t usually have a lot of fluff in my language, I am on task and I am direct. Now this gets me into trouble and can scare some people.

For the last two weeks I have been working 12 plus hour days doing everything it takes to get some demo equipment out to various people around the world. Yesterday morning I was checking on some orders that needed to go out today and found out that we had run out of the pieces to make this equipment and wouldn’t have more for a couple of weeks. So trying to be the team player I call up the guy that is suppose to be in charge and tell him we don’t have any more parts and I make a suggestion how we can do a few things and meet the most pressing needs. So this guy gets upset with me and ends up going to my boss because I wouldn’t ship the demos. Duh, we don’t have the parts, I guess I wasn’t smiling enough when I told him how to get around it.

So I have decided that I will start using emoticons in my emails and so that when I am just stating facts people don’t miss understand that I am not attaching them. So what is an emoticon, it is a smiley or a sequence of characters on your computer keyboard. If you don't see it, try tilting your head to the left -- the colon represents the eyes, the dash represents the nose and the right parenthesis represents the mouth. They are called emoticons because they intend to convey emotion!

Here are a few that I would have liked to use today:

>:-( Annoyed

(:- Blank expression

: -@! Cursing – ;-) Just kidding

;-, like, duh

: - s makes no sense

:-> sarcastic