It’s rapidly becoming one of the banes of our modern existence I think. It’s bad enough that it’s so easy to be misunderstood on instant messaging mediums due to the lack of tonal inflection etc, but now you find yourself dealing with embarrassing faux pas stemming from using poorly shortcutted (that’s probably not a real word but it’ll do! 😉 emoticons.
I was trying to wrap a conversation just now with a nice polite ‘anyway it’s nice to catch up …. I’m off to bed’ . And instead I ended the conversation with ‘anyway it’s nice to catch up …. I’m off to 
And there have been many other similarly embarrassing incidents due to simple typos and strange emoticon allocation. Wouldn’t care so much, except it was thrown at the one person on my contact list who wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment at all :S
It’s happened to me before….. little emoticons of people bonking thrown up in the middle of a conversation with a guy I was just getting to know. One of some crazy pot smoking bear thrown up when I was suggesting getting together with someone for a coffee. Sigh…. maybe I should just learn to type more carefully…. or get in the habit of actually proof reading what I’ve typed before hitting the enter button… or even go through and delete the offensive emoticons… or switch to a boring IM client that doesn’t have emoticons at all!!! Or maybe I should just shut the hell up and enjoy a little absurdity every now and then…. 🙂