Davide la Locomotive

What are your favorite emojis?

Most of them whisper.
A polite smile. A gentle thumbs-up.

But one?
One doesn’t whisper. It blasts through the wall on a cloud of chaos and pelvic thrusts.
This is my tribute to the greatest emoji ever made.

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Emojis usually stand in for a word.
Heart. Smile. Laugh. Shrug.
Which is fine, I guess. But if you’re going to summon a tiny picture over typing the word… why not go feral?

My favourite doesn’t just replace a word — it replaces language.
It captures thousands of words, a whole galaxy of vibes, and an emotion so specific I’m not sure we even have a term for it.

Which brings me to the greatest emoji ever created:
The Microsoft Teams Dancing Monkey.

If you haven’t witnessed this masterpiece of digital expression, I will try to explain — though mere words cannot do it justice.
It’s like a two-second French arthouse film, packed with as much drama and emotional range as one.

It’s an animated cartoon monkey, grinning wildly—eyes wide with the unhinged joy of a creature who knows exactly what it’s doing… and has chosen chaos anyway.

He’s doing a sort of dad-at-a-wedding dance.  
Huge manic grin. Eyes bugging out.  
There is pelvic thrusting.  
There is tail action.  
The hips do not lie—but they might be guilty of several other crimes.

A dance so earnest, so confident, so spectacularly terrible that you can not look away, no matter how much you want to.
The dance is bad, but the monkey thinks it’s John Travolta and is loving every second.

The first time I saw it, I was mesmerized.  
I worked at a company that used Teams, and once the monkey entered our lives, there was no going back.
I deployed it daily. Others picked it up.
It spread across teams like an uncontrollable rash.

When we eventually migrated to Slack, people asked:  
“But… what about the monkey?”

I spent four hours converting that little beast into a looping GIF, just so we could keep it.  
The thing about a GIF: the dance never stops.  
Even when it’s scrolled off-screen, you know—deep down—that monkey is still grinding away in the shadows.

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I love this monkey.
But let’s be honest: he’s not very good at dancing.

Sorry, buddy.

I’ve spent ages watching it again and again, wondering what he’s thinking.
He’s so convinced he’s nailing it.
We can see he isn’t.

For me, the monkey is a symbol — a perfect little loop of confident disaster.

I see it all the time.
People make bad decisions, they think they’re crushing it, but we can all see the truth.
They don’t see it — and maybe never will.

Believing confidence over common sense? Monkey.
Mistaking awkward for edgy? Monkey.
Spinning in circles, eyes wide, humping the air of your own delusion? Monkey.

I’ve been that monkey.
I think we all have.

Having a “great” idea, certain it’ll work perfectly…
and then watching it burst into flames.

I don’t hate the monkey.
But I don’t want to be him either.

When I find myself getting caught up in an idea,
or thinking that it’s easy,
I think…

Monkey.

 

Right.
Now we need to talk about what the heck is going on with its tail…

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