The importance of the exclamation point key!

The exclamation point key on my computer keyboard died.   It just stopped working.  It threw in the towel and left me hanging there…on my own…with no other emphasis adding backups.  At first I was upset—and quite frankly a little lost.  But as I thought about it a little bit, I realized that some self-introspection was necessary. 

It has been said that I often tend to embellish the stories I tell.  To me it’s all in the realm of my artistic scope.  I paint the picture with the brightest colors using full hand motions and every tone my voice can produce.  Each listener comes on the story train with me experiencing all the bumps and turns as I originally felt them.  And when the story ends we laugh, we cry, and we all can’t wait for the next one to begin.  Ok—that may be a stretch—but you get the idea.  I’m not changing the truths—I’m just making them more exciting to listen to.  So what does this have to do with my exclamation point key calling it quit? Everything.

I spend the larger part of my workday on the computer emailing back and forth with clients across the nation.  Which means they are getting to know me through the written word.  They can’t see my hands raised above my head in surrender or hear my voice getting louder and louder through the computer screen.  So I’m left with only a few options.  I CAN TYPE IN ALL CAPS TO MAKE IT APPEAR THAT I’M ANGRY. or i can type in all lowercase with grammaticale errors and make it seem like i dont now what im doing.  But either way the use of the exclamation point is necessary.  I can use it to show that I am soooooo excited about the new proposal!! YEAH!!!!!!  (And in this case multiple uses are necessary.)  Or it can be used to show intensity about NEEDING THE CONTRACT TODAY! (In this case the combined usage of caps and exclamation is extremely effective.)  But sometimes it just gets used to show nothing more than a little bit of embellishment—think of it as adding that “extra” umph to the email. (A good way to start the email is  “Hey!”—it’s not necessary but starts right away with a burst of intensity.)

Now by this point you are probably thinking that I’m nuts—and justifiably so.  But I have always had this overuse of the exclamation point problem.  In fact in college I had a professor write on one of my papers, “You only get to use the exclamation point three times in your writing career—and you used them all in the first paragraph!”  Apparently I didn’t learn from that comment at all; surprisingly enough I did pass his class.  So where does that leave me now?  I spent the whole day exclamation pointless.  For some reason my IT guy didn’t think that my problem was an emergency (why it took a backseat to fixing the glitch on the mainframe server I will never know). It was a sad day.  I tried to invent other ways of showing a little personality and found that the colon/bracket smiley faces always do the trick :).  You can have them wink ;), smile :o), stick out a tongue :op, frown L and pull so many other faces I have yet to figure out.  I also invoked the texter lingo inside me.  I was LOLing all day long. 

This experience should have been good for me.  It helped me go outside my normal exclamation zone and find other avenues to express myself.  And yet I was still tormenting our IT guy with fix it request.  One day turned into two, and three and four.  And at that point I was starting to get used to the lack of the little line with a dot under it.  I was starting to manage.  Then the unthinkable happened…my parenthesis key keeled over.  No longer could I create a little happy face at the end of my sentence.  That was the last straw. I can not type the things that came next-- they are best left to your imagination (for my reputation's sake anyway).

Days later here I am: back in the land of written expression—with all of my punctuation keys intact. Happy day! J