Don’t worry, be 😃
Global Emoji Shortage Roils Markets
Relief not expected until 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣
In another pandemic-triggered snafu, the global supply of emojis is the tightest it’s been since emojis surfaced in 1997.
At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, panicked traders are desperately buying up batches of emoji rejects discarded by designers.
“It’s pandemonium!” exclaimed Boyd Whiff Jr., of Whiff, Tinkle, and Bum, a blue-chip trading firm.
“You want a Unicode Standard emoji, you’re talking mondo dinero. Longtime customer needed a 💩 for a prank text to his NFL Fantasy League. Offered us his 2018 Mercedes GLE Coupe in exchange. With a full tank. Freshly detailed. Hey, if you’re printing that 💩, gonna cost you!”
There’s no shortage of emoji raw materials, but getting parts to manufacturers where they’re assembled has been grueling. Freighters stuffed with 🚢 emojis are stuck in ports, waiting for offload. Due to the trucker shortage, thousands of 🚚 emojis are stuck in idle tractor trailers.
Texters, irked by long lead times, are settling for partially assembled emojis like 😶.
As scarce as face emojis are, it’s even worse for pet emojis. Early in the pandemic, people looking for pets quickly exhausted the supply of available dogs. Desperately looking for companionship, many people resorted to adopting dog emojis. Supplies of 🐕 and 🐶 dried up in weeks. Many suppliers have three shifts of 🧑🏭s churning out pet emojis, but cheap knock-offs like 🐾 have left many would-be dog owners 💔.
In a perfect storm for texters, the SMS acronym market has also been slammed.
Lamented one teenager,
“You want a ROTFL? Good luck with that. Been waiting on a ROTFL or even a ROFL since October so I can answer my bass player Doobie’s text. If things don’t ease up, I might have to call him. My Dad said he’d show me how, but that just sounds so creepy!”
We asked one adolescent why she didn’t just type out Rolling On The Floor Laughing.
“Is that what ROTFL stands for? Bangerz! My brother told me it was Cornish for bwonk. What a nine-ball. Anyway, I’m not typing all that out. What would that take, like eight seconds? OK Millennial.”
Until supply chain snags ease, the best option for people desperate for emojis is joining the DIY movement. YouTube and TikTok are teeming with how-to videos on emoji construction.
Ready to get some bytes under your fingernails? Head over to emoji-mart on Github.
Follow emoji-mart’s brain dead simple README. But remember. Using inline CSS presents a potential maintainability issue since the HTML and associated styles are tightly coupled, bloating your HTML and making it harder to split up work. Oh, and you should be an expert in React front-ends. Your tween could do this!
If you are a) over 50, or b) someone who thinks Cascading Style Sheets are a luxury bed linen catalogued by Williams Sonoma, head on over to www.freepik.com, which stocks basic shapes you can cut-’n-paste into roll-your-own emojis.
With the 2022 elections on the horizon, White House officials, fearing massive voter defections, are scrambling to get emojis into the 👐 of texters tout suite. Rumors abound that at tomorrow’s emergency press conference, Press Secretary Psaki will announce the release of thirty million pieces from the nation’s Strategic Emojium Reserve.
As usual, rich nations are investing vast resources to shore up their own supplies, leaving poorer countries to fend for themselves. Speaking at an executive board meeting, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned,
“I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure — and the price of this failure will be paid with bland, whitebread, nutrient-deficient texts in the world’s poorest countries.”