I collect ‘first world problems’. By that, I don’t mean that I aim to be disgruntled by trivial nonsense. What I mean is that I see my own absurdity when this happens, and I tend to remember things that make me laugh.
At the end of last year, I moved to a new flat, and after a long day, with half unpacked boxes all around me, I started putting a sheet on my bed, only to find it didn’t fit. It was a double sheet and the bed was a king size.
“FUCK’S SAKE!” I shouted, as I struggled to pull the sheet over one corner, and watched it ping away from another.
Then I burst out laughing. What a privilege to even have such a problem, and what kind of person had I become?
***
An extremely unimportant problem that I have repeatedly encountered is the absence of an emoji for a vinyl record. It isn’t something I have ever taken seriously enough to be disgruntled by, but I would often briefly wonder why there wasn’t one.
There is a CD, but no record, which to me always seemed strange.
I considered contacting the powers that be in the emoji world and submitting a case for the inclusion of a record. Then I instantly dismissed the notion. I had little spare time as it was: the last thing I needed was to be embarking on a project like that.
***
A couple of years ago, I was standing outside a friend’s house, and I commented on a large and rusty piece of chain that was attached to the building, next to the front door. It was incongruous and had no apparent use.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“I’ve never noticed that before” said my friend. He looked slightly horrified, which was fair, because it looked creepy as fuck.
I was amused that he’d never noticed it before, because it was such a weird-looking thing, and it had obviously been there for years. Also, it was right on the front of his house.
My question was facetious – I was just entertaining myself – but I had wondered what the use of the chain could once have been? I thought it was probably part of an old fence or a crude means of security.
“There’s another bit of chain up there that would have been for a hanging basket” said our mate JP.
This chain is definitely not for a hanging basket” I said, laughing. “For one thing, it’s at waist height, and also it’s fixed right to the wall. And it’s massive! It looks like it should be on a ship or something.”
“You’re right” said JP. “It is a bit odd.”
“I can’t believe I never noticed it before” said our friend who’s house it was.
“We’ll be able to find out what it was for” said JP. “We can find out online somewhere.”
I asked if he intended to Google ‘rusty old chain’.
“Nooo! On a forum or something” said JP. “We could post a picture or describe it.”
“We could try Reddit” suggested our friend.
JP and I agreed that was a good call, and we went inside and posed our question to the world.
Very swiftly, we had several responses. One person had really gone to town, posting an extremely lengthy explanation about it being a security chain.
“Wow” said JP. “That is someone who clearly has way too much time on their hands!”
I burst out laughing.
I had to point out that we were the ones who had gone to the trouble of asking the question in the first place.
The thing is, though, I actually don’t have a lot of time on my hands. This had been a Friday night, in the midst of a session, just one of those silly rabbit holes that you willingly fall down for a bit of amusement. So it was actually a fair point that JP had made, in spite of the irony not being lost on any of us.
Not being the kind of person who has the time to sit at a computer replying to people asking pointless questions on Reddit, it quite obviously follows that I’m not a person who has the time to create a new emoji. A year ago, I was dimly aware that the process involved submitting a detailed argument for the validity of your proposed addition, and it was neither important nor entertaining enough to consider doing.
It was New Years’ Eve when it eventually got me.
Usually, I’m out somewhere DJing for New Year, but this year I had a gig on New Year’s Day night, but was free for New Year’s Eve. As a punter, I felt I wouldn’t be a big fan of NYE. Being out amongst it with way more people packed into venues than usual, and no DJ booth to escape to, was not a particularly inviting prospect. Also, I’d just moved into the new flat, and I thought it would be good to just have a few mates round.
My friend Joe Haze came round in the late afternoon, and everyone else would not be coming over until around ten, so we had a few hours of relative peace. Joe isn’t a DJ, and it was nice to catch up, so I didn’t do the antisocial thing of mixing on my own, and I just put some tunes on and we sat and talked.
It was at some point during this time that I was sending a message, and I remarked on there being no vinyl emoji.
“Why don’t you make one?” asked Joe.
I’m fairly sure it was an innocent question, and he wasn’t aware, at the time, of the complicated maze we’d find ourselves in.
“I can’t be arsed” I replied. “I think you have to submit some kind of essay about why the emoji is relevant. I don’t have time.”
“You’ve got time now” said Joe, which was a fair point.
“You do it” I said. “You’re good at writing.”
Joe was in his final year of a creative writing degree.
“We could do it together” he suggested. “What do you have to do, and who’s in charge of all of this?”
“I’m not entirely sure” I said, “But I’ll look into it.”
And so the nightmare began…
To submit a proposal for an emoji, you have to apply to the Unicode Consortium. The application process is lengthy (it takes far less time and effort to register a company, or to make a funding bid), and the information on how to complete each stage of the submission is not presented in a way that is particularly easy to follow. I also wasn’t sure if you had to create the design for the emoji yourself. It turned out that you do. That was actually the least harrowing part of the process, although it presented its own conundrums.
A decision had to be made as to whether the emoji would have variations. It seemed like a nice idea at the time to create a few options, so that you could choose between records with different coloured labels. Each version had to be created at two sizes, but none of this part was particularly difficult, or, in the grand scheme of it all, long.
On the Unicode website, you can find examples of emojis that are pending addition to the catalogue. There wasn’t a vinyl emoji pending, so – it seemed – all good. We continued.
The site also provides examples of previous applications. These all had a similar structure, and the list of questions answered was common to all.
To set up a social enterprise – that is, a private company that serves to do some kind of meaningful work in the community – you have to fill in various sections of an application form detailing what you propose to do, how you are going to do it, who it will benefit, how it will benefit them, and why there is any purpose in what you are doing. Applying to submit an emoji to Unicode is a bit like this.
A coherent argument for why the emoji is relevant and necessary must be presented. You must also decide where in the catalogue the emoji will appear, and provide some reasoning for why. Should your emoji be placed next to a trumpet or a zebra? What is its role in the real world?
Research must also be done into how many search engine submissions are made for your proposed object, creature, emotion, or whatever it is you’re trying to sell to them. Sell not actually being the operative word here, as you do not receive any payment for a successful submission (to be fair, I hadn’t actually considered whether you did or not, it just all seemed like a funny thing to do). What you do get, though, is credit for being the creator of your emoji. I thought it would be quite a hilarious badge of honour to be named as co-creator of ours. A lesson here, I think, is to not let your ego get the better of you.
At some point during our task, my flatmate came in.
“What are you guys up to?” he asked.
“We’re submitting a proposal for a vinyl emoji to Unicode” I said.
“Of course you are.”
I won’t go through each section of the proposal, because to do it once was bad enough. I have no wish to either relive it all, or to subject anyone else to it.
It was probably about 9pm when we got to the background research part, and we decided that, being as it was New Year’s Eve and all, we should probably put the project aside for the evening, and return to it at a later date. Having discussed our availability in early January, we set a date and time for this in Google Calendar.
When we reconvened a couple of weeks later, we thought our work was nearly done. It turned out, though, that this was far from the case. In addition to the proposal itself, there were various forms to fill out. After a brief, weary moment of disheartenment, we got back on the case. Or we tried to do so. You couldn’t actually fill the forms out. We were baffled. What was going on?
Eventually, we found an answer – submissions were currently closed. It was simultaneously a relief and a kick in the teeth. The next question, of course, was when would they be open again? According to the Unicode website, it would be the 1st of April.
“Right,” I said “That’s it then. Get it in your calendar. Midnight on April Fools’ Day, we get straight back on this.”
The thing was, when we did get back onto the task, with submissions being reopened, a lot more information was available. Unfortunately, it didn’t bode well. If a submission for your emoji has already been made and rejected, your application will be dismissed. There wasn’t a rejected submission for a vinyl emoji, however there was one that had been floating in limbo, neither approved nor rejected, for a very long time. This hadn’t been on the previous list of submissions we’d looked at, and it was very old. It seemed that nobody at Unicode cared. We were a bit lost. What did this all mean? Could we submit our proposal or not? We weren’t sure, and by then we were a little past caring. Sometimes you have to let things go.
I was quite busy in April, anyway, even by my own standards. I’d put it out there that it would be a good thing to organise a fundraising event in Leeds for humanitarian aid in Ukraine, and a lot of people got on board with that, and I was in the midst of sorting that out. As far as time-consuming projects go, helping people affected by a war is worth it, whereas the Unicode application was just a joke that got out of hand. Also, my good mate Nel was back in the UK for a month, having moved to Australia in 2018. Catching up with old friends was also far more important – and a lot more fun – than some mad wild goose chase about an emoji.
Of course, I do wonder if there will ever be a vinyl record emoji, although I am less baffled by the lack of one now than I was back then. As with the mystery of the rusty chain, Reddit provided an answer, albeit a slightly dubious one, that it is due to vinyl not being so big in Japan as it is here. Oh, and there is also a change.org petition, which Defected Records created.
I’ve not signed the petition, as entertaining as it is that someone would go to the trouble of setting one up. Since the debacle of the vinyl emoji, I have noticed that there is also no emoji for a cassette tape. Nor is there one for a jumper or sweater. Or for many other things that I have briefly noticed, and since forgotten…