Day: March 27, 2026

I guess this makes me sound old

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago on Thanksgiving, my family missed our flight. 

Actually, we did not miss our flight, but rather we missed the recommended two-hour check-in period because mythical wife and I were parents new to two kids, had a boatload of cargo to haul with us, and had to check-in at a service desk, instead of just going straight to security as if we didn’t have all the extra crap.  And the only reason why we missed it is because ATL’s parking garage is the worst in the nation [fact] and the 15 minutes in which it took us to get from car to terminal was the difference between making it and not.

Being late, I can take responsibility for.  Airline travel these days is a stressful ordeal most of the time, multiplied by the fact that it was a holiday.  Add to the fact that parenting is hard, especially at the time, two kids under the ages of two.

What really bothered me about the whole situation was the fact that after we were told that we would not be getting onto our flight, was the fact that for the next hour and 50 minutes, while I was on the phone with Delta trying to figure out what our options were, was knowing that our aircraft was sitting there, still waiting for cargo to be loaded, still waiting for people to board, still, just fucking waiting.  Meanwhile, thanks to some uppity gate agents hiding behind the subjectively conveniently wall of protocol, my family was denied clearance, and I had to drop $700 on the spot for two new day-of holiday tickets in order to go to Virginia for barely 12 hours, all for being 10 minutes past a recommended check-in time.

Look, I know that rules are rules, and my family wasn’t there at precisely 2+ hours before departure time.  But I’ve witnessed in my rather copious flying experiences people in way more dire and illogical, and should-be-fucked situations emerge victorious, all because there’s a generous amount of discretion, grace and ability to read the room involved with being in airline customer support.

I was ten minutes late.  I wasn’t a dick or raised my voice or created a scene with the agent.  I also understand the needs of the baggage handlers and that their time needs to be accounted for.  I wasn’t asking for super special treatment, and to be escorted through security through special assistance.  I just wanted a little bit of grace and understanding for our parenting situation, and a little bit of leniency on the time, especially since there was more than enough of it remaining to make our flight.

But no, we were stonewalled, marked as no-shows, and not allowed to advance on our original itinerary.  The reasonable flights were refunded as credit, but that needed to be used immediately along with $700 extra dollars to book two new flights, and it led to a real shitty holiday travel experience.

All because a gate agent didn’t really feel like working, and used the wall of protocol to shield themselves behind.

It’s not lost on me that from a cold hard facts point of view, the agent did nothing wrong.  From a procedural standpoint, they did everything to the T, and when the day is over, you really can’t ask for much more from an employee.

Nobody is required or expected to go above their required duties, and I know there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to Office Space debates on doing the bare minimum versus trying to do more, but when the asks are not difficult or require little extra effort, but the result is the satisfaction and gratitude of helping another person accomplish something, why the fuck not give it a whirl?

I’m sure that there have been points in my life where I’ve hidden behind the exact same wall of protocol, but I’m fairly certain that if I did it, it was coming from a place of antagonism, and I was probably aware that my refusal to budge was going to be seen as an act of hostility, from whom I was being obtuse with.

Well that introduction went a little long, because what the whole point of this whole post is that I recently had a situation with a colleague, where I asked for some assistance with a project, and was met with a surprising amount of resistance, a deflection from a shield of protocol, and a conclusion where the task was not completed, and will have to wait an entire week for this person to come back from PTO before it gets completed.

Like the airline story, they’re not in the wrong with the course of action that they chose to take, but the ask I had for them was to convert two sentences and three bullet points into a smaller, digestible 2-3 sentence paragraph; a task that I’ve seen not just any copywriter, but this specific copywriter accomplish in less than five minutes.  I even vetted the ask with them over Teams before entering the request into Workfront, which was met with a response indicating how easy it would be.

But once they received it in Workfront, they responded to the group that the due date for the task was already past-due because our PMs are suspect in capability, and that it would have to wait until the following week due to their upcoming PTO, and that they recommended assigning it to another copywriter if it was urgent.

To this type of response, I scrunched my brow at the screen, and wondered why the fuck they had agreed upon its ease if they weren’t going to help out with it in the first place?  Furthermore, this all happened at like 10 am in the work day, there was more than enough time to just knock it out, then I could do my part, and we could close the entire project out, and that would be one less ticket looming over our workloads.

Aggravated, I decided to not reassign the task, and to make sure it remains on this copywriter’s plate.  It has the time, but it could have been done so much sooner, and on principle, I’m going to make sure that they still do it, and lord help me if they complain about their workload when they get to it then.

I get wanting to coast before a vacation, but I’m also the type who absolutely abhors the idea of anyone having to pick up or fill in or finish something that I started.  I’m a monster when it comes to trying to close out all my tasks, tie up all loose ends, and knock out anything that can be knocked out before I go radio silent.  To me, it just seems like common courtesy, but as I very well have learned throughout my life, nobody works harder than a Korean, and I feel as if I’m a step above the rest on top of it.

Ultimately, my mind immediately thought to the notion that this wasn’t just ordinary apathetic work avoidance, but rather more typical to Gen-Z work ethic, and no matter how nice and chipper and glowy of personalities a worker can be, the barest of bare minimums is to be expected, and that anything that might be construed as exceeding such, is absolutely out of the question.

Nice enough and chipper and pleasant as this copywriter is, they still turtled up behind the shield of protocol as if I were asking them to find the cure for cancer.  Shifting the request to the other copywriter was out of the question to me, because they’re younger and more apt to bitch about an additional request being made of them, and I don’t want to hear it.  But even in spite of all the remaining time in the day, they didn’t have the time to address my ask, but they did have time to get on the department Teams channel and wish a happy birthday to fucking Mariah Carey.

Perhaps the five minutes of doing such should be construed as five minutes of flagrant not-work time spent, and they should make up for it by spending five minutes on the task that I had asked them for.

Either way, I suppose complaining about the perceived work ethics of those younger than me qualifies as one of those things that justifies the fact that I’m old now.  Whatever though, at least I know I’m capable of getting shit done, even if others might consider such attribute as giving shit away.

The subtle aggression of emoji skin tones

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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Every workplace’s text client communication vibe is different.  I’ve been places where there are a ton of old motherfuckers around, so there’s basically no text internal communication client at all, and even if there is one, nobody uses it, and those who do are pariahs and are looked at like moon people for even daring to consider internal text client communication as official business correspondence.

Conversely, I’ve also been to places that ran Slack, which means there are like 76 different channels of groups, communities, and teams, and every single message is responded to in 164 different gifs and emojis, and Slack communication is interpreted as official business, and there are major businesses decisions that are locked in via the client.

Where I’m at these days is kind of midway point between the two, where we run Microsoft Teams as our official client.  There are plenty of technologically inept olds still in the company that by virtue of either refusing, or are just too old to figure out how to use the client, simply don’t.  But I’m fortunate to my department having a lot more technologically savvy users who have no issues using the client, and it’s what we use on the regular to communicate, in and out of the office.

The majority of the etiquette here are users using the default emojis to acknowledge or recognize appreciation, mostly the standard yellow thumbs up, and heart, and if something is funny, then the laughing face emoji.

However recently, I’ve noticed a little shift in some user behavior that kind of has me thinking some things.  At first, it started with some remarks in some group threads, where the responses aren’t just getting thumbs up’ped, but they’re being thumbs up’ped with both the regular default yellow thumbs up, as well as the black skin tone thumbs up.

Obviously, in spite of my general appreciation of dark humor, I have no issue with black people representing and busting out black skin tone thumbs up emojis.  It’s just that I couldn’t help but notice that after these started getting used, it didn’t take long before I noticed that later on, when there was another comment that warranted mass acknowledgement, I would see that in addition to the black skin thumbs ups, there were now users responding with white people thumbs ups.

The thing for me is that I have no qualms with the white folks doing this, it’s just that in my observations, this was behavior that was not done until the emergence of black skin thumbs up emojis.  Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m likely overthinking things, but there’s something that seems subtly passive aggressive with a hint of racism about the act, as if some of my white colleagues were kind of triggered or offended that some of our black colleagues decided to start utilizing black thumbs up emojis, so they decided to respond with white ones.

And then we have comments that look like the above, where there’s a mish-mash of colored emojis in response to an inconsequential remark in the grand spectrum of a work day.

What if I felt the need to jump in on this racial representation?  You know who doesn’t get considered in the great expansion of emoji skin tones?  That’s right, Asian folks.  There are skin tones to account for white people, black people, and numerous shades of brown to cover Hispanics, Middle Eastern, Indian, or anyone whose skin tone is remotely in the spectrum. 

But Asian people?  No dice there.  No light skin tones with a hint of warmth to encapsulate Asians, and maybe some people from like Southeast Asia, the Pacific Island, or regions of Korea and Japan where there are lot more rural folks with tanned skin could get away with using some of the brown-tone emojis, but the fact of the matter is that there is no real set of emojis that takes into consideration Asian skin tones.

Obviously, the generic yellow thumbs up is not sufficient for Asian folks, because we are not fucking Simpsons characters, and have tones that look that yellow.

Needless to say, I’m leaning in a direction where I wish all skin tones would just be eliminated, and we’re left with just the standardized Simpsons yellow emoji.  Take race out of the equation, and eliminate any possibility for such subtle passive aggression.  I know all the people utilizing these non-standard emojis and I don’t think they’re trying to be racist, but to me, it kind of comes off that way, especially since racist-ass Microsoft’s emoji catalog doesn’t account for Asians, and if I wanted to jump aboard the representation train, I can’t.