Speed Bumps, Hubris and Humility

Just about the time you think you have a handle on all the important stuff in the techno-world, you drive over a minor speed bump on the road to social wizdom. My speed bump was not a huge thing, but a relatively small thing. I received an e-mail from a colleague at a good-sized PR firm in St. Paul, and noticed all kinds of familiar little icons in the company signature at the bottom of the message. There was a Facebook icon, a Twitter icon, a LinkedIn icon and a fourth one that I didn't recognize. The firm's logo was there too, looking as if it been designed just to fit perfectly right in that spot.

I was overwhelmed by a moment of pure, intense jealousy--the kind I've only rarely experienced since Marian Thompson beat me out for graduation speaker at dear old Denfeld High School in Duluth. "I am on Facebook," I said to myself. "I am on Twitter. I am on LinkedIn. I even have a blog. I am just as plugged in as those big guys. But who can tell from my pathetically icon-free e-mails? As God is my witness, I'll never go iconless again."

In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess that I thought it would be a cinch because of all the cool stuff I've learned over the last few weeks. But I was dead wrong...to paraphrase the Munchkins, "I'm not only nearly wrong, I'm really most sincerely wrong."

As it turned out, adding my logo and all those fetching little symbols at the foot of my e-mails required a series of ridiculously complicated steps. With my limited knowledge, it felt like I was trying to do cranial surgery with a roll of duct tape and a wooden spoon.

I won't bore you with the technical details, but here's the Reader's Digest version of my story.

1. I still don't have any of those little icons on my e-mail signature.

2. I accidentally deleted my logo file trying to transfer it into the signature.

3. I discovered that doing any of the steps out of sequence forces you to go back and start all over again, which I did at least a dozen times.

4. I concluded that HTML stands for "Hardly Tough except for Morons and Losers."

The whole exercise was a frustrating (possibly karmic) lesson in abject humility. OK, I get it. I may have graduated from the jurassic age, but I've only advanced as far as the pleistocene era. Baby steps, baby steps.

Oh, don't worry, I'm not giving up. I'll try again, but I think I'll give it a few days. It will take me that long to get my hubris back.