“Limited Mobility” (Excerpt)
Each morning from Monday to Friday, I arrive at work promptly at 9:10am, exactly ten minutes late. My supervisor, Troy, an irritatingly tall Ivy League graduate with an unkempt man-bun, often speculates that my tardiness is so consistent it borders on punctuality. He doesn’t know the half of it.
I work as a moderator for an online reviews website. It’s basically exactly the same as every other review website, only YayOrNay.com uses symbol-based emoticons to rate everything from restaurants to health clinics. We don’t use those new-fangled cartoon emojis, just the old school keyboard ones. It’s retro-chic, which really speaks to our 18-to-24 demographic.
Is the restaurant so hip that the staff change their quality of service depending on the perceived coolness of the patron? Insert snooty bird. <(｀^´)>
Did your manicurist say something racist that made you want to break shit? Insert incredulous face with overturned table. (o_O)ﾉ ┻━┻
Not sure what to say on any particular topic? Insert the shrug. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly, most of my day is spent trying to decipher the symbols people leave on our site and determining if they’re inappropriate or slanderous. I’m pretty fluent at this point, something best demonstrated by my ever-growing vocabulary for emoticon breasts:
(@)(@) ( • Y • ) （。 ㅅ 。）
Excerpt from: The Feathertale Review, Issue #16