Pride and Paint

How hard could it be to make a text-only meme, I said to myself when Michael handed me a sticky not with some writing on it. Just make a post with a colored background – people I absolutely know aren’t as smart as I am are doing them, I said to myself. And that, dear friends, is pride.

It goes before a fall every time.

Some five hours later as I finally give up in complete and utter disgust and have to once again call on my tech-savy friend, Charli, for rescue, I am close to homicidal. It takes her less than 5 minutes to come up with exactly what I’m needing. She sends it to me and I send it on to Michael. Given the choice of being grateful or complaining that he doesn’t like the colors, he opts for the latter. Charli sends me a scathing text about beggars being choosers and I regretfully tell her she’s absolutely right. The man is a text book case of expecting to be catered to. I send him a second meme and he likes it. I am still bitter and angry about my own lack of tech-saviness and although it’s against my better judgment, I go back to the fool paint program Charli has sent me to and try again. She has also reminded me that I am not a graphic artist and advised me against beating myself up about it. It’s kind of her but it doesn’t do much good.

After another nearly two hours of teeth gnashing and turning the air around me blue with cursing, I manage to actually come up with something. I save the image as instructed and look in downloads as instructed but while the file is there, the image isn’t. I start over another dozen times and finally realize that it’s a bad file format – I’ve been saving to PNG when I should’ve been saving to JPEG. I have no idea what this actually means but I do recognize it as the problem. Astonishingly, I try one final time and lo and behold, it works. I am dumbstruck, exhausted, and three quarters blind. And yet, there is a feeling of triumph that I can’t quite get past.

Take that you son-of-a-bitchin’ technology.