Spoiler Alert: Today’s blog post isn’t going to disrupt any paradigms.

Not all issues we face in the business world are life or death/do or die. Many of them are decidedly trivial.

Even more than a decade after I first saw them appear, I remain vexed by the use of emoticons (or emojiis, as the kids now call them) in business correspondence.

I still remember the first time I saw an emoticon in an email sent to me, more than ten years ago. What was jarring about it wasn’t the what, but the who: it was a smiley face 🙂 in an email from a businessman in his mid-fifties.

It vexed me because of my perspective that business correspondence is, um, serious business. The implied irreverence caught me off guard.

Since then seldom a day goes by where I don’t receive work emails that contain emojiis. It still bugs me to some degree, but perhaps I’ve become desensitized.

Or perhaps I’ve become less uptight.

Not that I’m a stranger to irreverence, mind you, as anyone who knows me will attest. I often find myself taken with the idea of allowing my phone’s misguided auto-corrects to go out unfixed in business emails.

I never do it though.

What I actually do, however, is salt the occasional work email I write with emojiis. 😛

If you can’t beat them, join them. 😉