#Thumbs up meme thumbs down emoji professional#

(Were they trying to say, 'Yes, you're still talking, but we're not really listening?' I suppose you'd have to ask them.) After Donnelly tweeted yesterday about Ireland's progress on the vaccine front, thousands of people simply replied with a single thumbs-up emoji. In fact – look, people are bored – a meme appears to have been born. When the exchange was reported over the weekend, in the Sunday Independent, Donnelly's wayward emoji use didn't go unnoticed. Whatever his inner thoughts or motives, news of the exchange is doing nothing to dispel the niggling sense some have that Donnelly's personal brand runs towards the smug and the snarky. If you are going to let an emoji – any emoji – do the grunt work for you in a conversation, you'd really better know what you're getting yourself into

#Thumbs up meme thumbs down emoji professional#

Did Donnelly really mean to give the CMO the brush-off? Is he a simply a busy man for whom brevity is key? Did he realise in the moment that this was an inappropriate response to a professional correspondence? Or is he just hopelessly out of touch with the nebulous contexts of each emoji? Let’s pause this scene for a moment, and step outside it, Matrix-style. When Holohan reiterated the seriousness of the situation some days later, texting Donnelly that the “R” number in Dublin had increased (not exactly good news), Donnelly replied with a single thumbs-up emoji. (Donnelly had said on radio that transmission was slowing in Dublin and that the outlook appeared “positive”).

On October 12th the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan, texted Donnelly to say that the number of Covid-19 cases in Dublin was on the rise and to advise him to be cautious in public messages about the virus in the capital.