For the past six months I’ve been agonizing over where our new office should be located.  The agony has never been related to determining what factors should be evaluated so much as it’s been related to the prioritization of these factors. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that there is a “best” choice among any given number of options. You can imagine how difficult this has made my life considering it’s not true in most cases.

Continue Reading “An Office Move – How Hard Can It Be?”

I read this article the other day, about some company’s hair-brained attempt to charge for usage of a sarcasm symbol. The idea is this — you pay them about $2, and you get to insert this special symbol denoting sarcasm in any of your future communications (email, text messages, Website comments, etc.).

Although I doubt this will catch on, it did get me thinking… with all of the text communication we partake in daily, is the standard keyboard in all of its 101-key glory really enough?

The problem with communicating via text is it’s impossible to convey a mood or voice — how many times have you read an email and wondered, “Is this person mad at me? Is he serious? Joking? Being sarcastic?” On the flip side, how often has an email you’ve written gotten you into trouble because it was misread (or misunderstood) by its recipient?

I know, our communications tools have evolved the ability to add little symbols like smiley faces and such. Is that enough? Especially for professional communication? Maybe it’s high time we expanded upon our standard keyboard — add some “mood” keys to help prevent our little misunderstandings.

Note: The author was attempting to be somewhat sarcastic when writing this post.

Photo by alcomm.