Once again, The Stairwell welcomes Mr Hunt as he rails against something inconsequential to such a degree he loses his perspective completely and thus fails to elicit any sympathy from his readers.

SMUG: The attitude of idiocy

Like my smiling dullard of a blogmate, I use a Mac. I’m not going to go on about it, I just like them better. They work for me. Other operating systems are available but they usually make me want to rip the monitor from the desk and use it as a makeshift weapon to obliterate the whirring, beige desktop box that houses the spawn of Satan OS coding.

Sidebar: this has become a lot easier since the introduction of LCD screens that can be wielded one-handed.

But I digress. As I said, Mac OS is my weapon of choice but that doesn’t stop me hating the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads with the heat of a thousand dying suns. They are just so smug. They aim for humour and instead land slap bang in the middle of toe-curling embarrassment and stomach-churning, eye-bleeding awfulness.

Here is one now:

I just inadvertently watched it again during the process of uploading it and something awful happened. I was so incensed by Apple’s air of smug superiority I grabbed the nearest thing I could lay my hands on and threw it out the window. Now I don’t have a cat anymore.

Thanks, Apple. Way to go you dead-eyed, bland-vomiting cat killers.

The flip side of all this is that in some ways I actually thought my allergic reaction to the overwhelming smug-storm Apple sent cascading unbidden into my eyes and ears was a positive sign. It showed that despite my exclusive devotion to their technology, I wasn’t a fan boy. I still had the capacity to bring my critical functions to bear on something that was unequivocally crap, however many shiny apple logos they slapped all over it. I didn’t like the ‘Mighty Mouse’ either. I was still a long way from becoming the sort of  emaciated, drooling hipster that wears their Apple affiliation like some sort of brushed-aluminium badge of creativity.

I was safe.

And then Microsoft went and launched the Windows 7 campaign and in doing so set a new bar for smug, self-satisfied, condescending marketing effluent. Well done, Team Gates, you just blew away my only handhold, literally my last hope of remaining non-partisan. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Microsoft, you see, thought it would be a good idea for people to hold Windows 7 Launch Parties – where run-of-the-mill people like you and me could get together with friends and teach each other to laboriously burn a DVD of people snowboarding or whatever. Doesn’t that sound like fun –  marketing a product you hate, foisting it on your love ones and not even getting paid for the privilege?

The most laughable part of this whole mess is that Microsoft genuinely thought people would do this. Faced with millions of Mac evangelists they clearly thought people would want to do the same for them. Shout the seventh coming of Windows from the rooftops. They seemingly failed to grasp the self-evident difference that people CHOOSE to use a Mac. Windows is just the car crash of an OS we all got landed with by default. No one wants to bring up Windows around the water cooler, it’d be like cheerfully striking up a conversation about taxes or STDs or global poverty, they’re just a distasteful part of life that have been around so long people have forgotten it could be any other way.

Anyway, in order to get people to organise these deluded, creepy Windows 7 launch shindigs, Microsoft put together a video that they no doubt dubbed ‘edutainment’.

(excuse me, my dictionary just haemorrhaged blood onto the carpet, I just need to clean it up)

…

Where was I? Right, the video. Realising that no human being would ever want to be part of such a travesty, Microsoft built and programmed a group of androids to star in the advert. The droids would appear humanoid and physically signify the different demographics Microsoft hoped to appeal to – old, geeky, irritating and black respectively. These demographics would each wear a stupid colour-coded uniform as if they were in Star Trek or something. Unfortunately the finished robots were given a variant of the Windows operating system and subsequently failed to be able to act, speak, produce a realistic air of camaraderie or generally pass for human beings by whatever metric you cared to apply.

The result was not only the worst advert in the history of advertising but also quite possibly the poorest example of work produce by any human being in any discipline, ever. It is the nadir of modern civilisation, making a complete mockery of the noble journey begun by Neolithic man when he first scratched an ethnically diverse herd of buffalo onto the rocky wall of his cave. Beating by some margin even the moronic delight’s of R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet”.

What we have here, people, is a piece of work so smug, so sickening, so utterly blind to its own ridiculousness – that it defies any attempt to truly describe it.

Like the Matrix, you have to see it.

And see it you must.

How far did you get through it before your soul withered to a dry husk within your chest and you dropped to the floor, leaking black tar from every orifice?

I only got as far as the bit where they suggest making the party list using ‘party planning tools’.

Utterly devoid of merit thought it is, the video is at least controllable. Avoid typing ‘talentless idiot party’ into Google and you’re basically going to escape unscathed.

So Microsoft busted out the poster campaign.

Now I can’t go down into the underground without being faced with a virtual tableau of Smugotrons claiming they had something to do with making Windows 7.

And why are they so keen to claim that anyway? It’s not like it’s the cure for cancer or anything, is it? Even if they did come up with the shaking-to-clear-the-other-windows thing (which they didn’t) I can’t even begin to describe how little I care.

Look at him. Look at his smug little face. I want to hurt him so bad. I want to stuff that chip up his nose and into the sinus cavities beyond. Then I want to slam his face against the wooden table top until he chokes to death on blood engorged potato mush.

Is that an over-reaction?

Every day I have to endure a whole tunnel of these images on the underground, trapped on a travelator that Microsoft have probably programmed to run at half speed to prolong the encounter. I’m genuinely surprised that instances of grievous bodily harm haven’t shot up ten fold on the Jubilee line. Personally, it takes everything I’ve got not to beat at the giant images with my fists until my knuckles are cracked and torn from the impact.

Okay, that’s it. I can’t see anymore. I think I must have finally reached blind fury.

I’m going to go and find my cat.