Smugness is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as being "too pleased or satisfied..."Personally, I think smugness should be classified as the eighth deadly sin, because unlike pride, I find smugness always leads to a mighty and often uncomfortable calamity. Particularly when I try and cut corners with no idea of the outcome.
Take my feeble attempts to replicate my East End Gallery newsletter to this blog. I assumed, wrongly, that I would simply be able to cut and paste the content of the newsletter and TA-DA, I would save a great deal of time and effort. Plus, I was trying to conduct this miraculous cyber-spacial (is that a word?!) feat when I was quite tired. With all the optimism of the village idiot, I launched forth and ended up in a computer generated hell.
I had completely forgotten that the font, colour, background and all those other add-ons on my blog page would not take kindly to a stealth landing from Another Application. That's my explanation, anyway. All I knew was, horror of horrors, my copy and paste of the newsletter content ended up as ghastly black lettering on a weird chocolate background. My next futile action produced ghostly white lettering on a pale grey background. No matter how much I tried, I had entered shit creek in my canoe with no paddle and no idea.
By this stage, I was more than a tad frustrated and battling against the odds. Somehow I managed to produce an extremely boring black lettering on a plain background post. Miraculously, and with no clue, I also ended up with most of the photos I had been wanting to load to the post as well.
With weary resignation, I concluded that the Internet had won again. What I had hoped to be a bit of magical time saving operation had turned into a complete disaster. And smugness had proved again, to be my nemesis.
The moral of this story? Never try to outsmart a computer. Never try a simpleton tactic that has no hope of success. Walk away from the dastardly device, lest the urge to swing a sledgehammer becomes overwhelming...The bloody machine would still be there in the morning, satisfied by its role in my downfall.
Oddly, I found these words quite comforting. And there is always the sledgehammer option!
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