THE GREAT PLAGUE

Our apartment is now thoroughly infested with emoticons. Hundreds of emoticons are zooming across our floors, bouncing off the walls, tying shoelaces and USB-cables together in sailor’s knots, playfully tunneling around in the flour and sugar, bungee-jumping off the ceiling-fan with elastic-bands, and generally wreaking havoc, spreading gross germs and bad memes everywhere. An exterminator is on his way here as I type this text.

These emoticons are such devilish little monsters, they’ve even discovered that it’s fun to use our DVDs as their own personal giant Frisbees. Some of the emoticons are even entertaining the others by skillfully juggling our vitamin-supplements.

But that’s not even the worst of it: Emoticons are so resilient that vacuuming them with a vacuum-cleaner has no effect other than giving them an exciting thrill, not unlike an amusement-park ride, and then they all jump out again, scattering dust far and wide.

We did kinda sorta bring this upon ourselves, actually. Not many people know this, but emoticons generally survive by eating the undeleted e-mails that accumulate (if unchecked) in the Spam folders of e-mail accounts. Also, the undeleted applets and javascript-cookies that can accumulate (if unchecked) in the cache of any given web-browser application are very nourishing and revitalizing food for emoticons, really helping them thrive, grow, and breed vast multitudes of offspring. This is why it’s a good idea to periodically clean out all the folders in one’s e-mail account, and frequently cleanse the cache of one’s web-browser.

So a word to the wise: SAVE YOURSELVES ! ! ! DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU, because you SO do NOT want a home full of emoticons, trust me.