// Fluent in Kermlish

Slack is fantastic. It offers a harmonised mixture of professionalism and pure banter in the workplace. One minute you’re frantically discussing solutions to an incident in the IM channel, debating with UX about how the form should look, or having a professional chat with your Engineering Manager about your future goals. The next you’re sending ridiculous gifs to a workmate, reacting to a successful Slack bot notification with a NOICE emoji, or in a huddle drawing the sick graffiti S we all did as kids right over someone’s screen share.

Here’s a story about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on Slack in my entire career.

I was working in a team, and that team had multiple services. One of those services was a backbone — a dependency for every other service in the entire business. One of only a few where if it went down, everything went down with it. You’ve worked with them, you know the ones I mean.

This specific service was an API that everything else eventually communicated with in the pipeline. One of my good friends, and one of the best Senior Engineers I’ve ever worked with, was working on a simple bug ticket within it. He’d pushed up a change — and don’t ask me what exactly happened, I don’t even think he knew — but boom. The business lit up like a Christmas tree. Grafana was crying, 429s everywhere, PagerDuty was bombarding everyone, and multiple P1 incidents were raised with incident management teams jumping into action trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Within five minutes the fault was identified, and my friend was @tagged in every channel across about 16 threads. His reaction surprised even me, and I knew what he was like. I’ll never forget it. I was cry laughing in the middle of a major company wide incident.

We had a running joke within the team. During daily menial tasks, casual chats, or quick replies - we’d talk in Kermit the Frog emojis. There was a :kerm-x: or :x-kerm: emoji for everything. We called it Kermlish. Or just Kerm Language.

It started with a single :oops-kerm:. Every thread he was tagged in got reacted to with an emoji that suggested a minor, lighthearted mistake — when obviously, in this case, it was anything but. Which in turn made it funny. People inevitably got frustrated and started demanding updates and immediate action. To which he replied to every single one of them in pure, fluent, C2-level native Kermlish.

The anger was something else. The flak was incredible. And the whole situation was pure bloody comedy gold. I’ve never seen anything quite so glorious on Slack. Is he mocking us? Does he actually care? Is he doing anything about it? All met with Kerm profanities, Kerm insults and Kerm debates. It reached boiling point and one of the Incident Managers pulled him for an urgent huddle to discuss what the hell he was playing at. The call lasted only a few minutes.

He’s so done, I thought. This chaotic beautiful nonsense is over. Then immediately, the incident channels started going quiet. Everything was resolving on PagerDuty. Services were spinning back up.

What had actually happened?

The second he’d released the change and realised it had broken everything, he’d already thrown up an MR to fix it. Whilst the entire business was losing their minds, he had pipelines running to merge a fix to prod. He fixed it as fast as he’d broken it. The whole Kerm campaign wasn’t him taking the piss, it was his way of telling everyone to chill out. He knew, he’d sorted it. Just wait a damn minute.

That’s the thing about the best engineers I’ve worked with. When something breaks, the bullshit is never coming from them. No frantic updates and no defensive Slack essays. Just handling the fan whilst crap hits it and everyone else loses their minds. He’d broken prod but he’d also already fixed it before most people had even finished moaning at him.

The greatest Kermit the Frog performance in the history of Slack. And somehow, the most professional thing I’ve ever witnessed.