or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk



Reference Question of the Week – 11/7/14

   November 15th, 2014

JwingdingsThis was kind of a funny question, right up until I realized I had created a monster.

A patron, who is somewhat new to email, walked up to the desk and said,

Patron: I think some of my friends' email accounts have all been hacked by the same person, and he's sending me messages.

Me: Oh really, why?

Patron: Because at the end of a lot of messages - not all of them, but some of them - it is signed with just the initial J. Someone named J must have hacked their accounts and is sending messages to me, but they don't know they've been hacked because sometimes the messages really come from my friends.

I love a good conspiracy, but in this case I explained what emoticons are and how people sometimes use them in email to display smiling or frowning faces. Some people just used keyboard characters, some use a special font, and some use images.

In this case the patron's friends must be using Outlook, which uses Wingdings font to display emoji. If other email programs don't use that technique, it will just show that character in the default font, which is usually a J for a smiley face.

We then went back over to his computer which still had his Yahoo mail up, and I showed him how he could add emojis to his message. He was thrilled, and I think now all of his friends are going to get sick of it very quickly.

Even though the patron was happy, I still much prefer the idea of a mysterious person named J hacking all his friends' accounts just to send him messages.




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One Response to “Reference Question of the Week – 11/7/14”

  1. Doug Cooper Says:

    Oh, so that’s what those seemingly random letters mean. I’ve seen that too. Thanks, Brian