I Told You So

There are few pleasures in the world that can compare with the sheer joy of saying "I told you so". Very rare is the person who gets the opportunity to do it and refrains from taking advantage of it. Parents may plead and teachers scream that it is not good manners but, if it comes to a clash between good manners and pleasure, when had good manners ever won? And, remember, it is very seldom that you feel that urge to say 'I told you so' when something good has happened as you predicted. It is almost invariably when you have predicted doom if a certain course of action is taken and it comes true. AND, for it to come true, you must have lost that argument and the other(s) must have opted for THAT course of action. Now, to have a defeat in an argument rankling inside you AND the opportunity to say 'I told you so' arises some time later...well, are we saints that we can stay silent? To be sure, rubbing someone else's nose in the fact that he was wrong has very seldom, if ever, worked to convince him to correct himself. Even the most cloddish of people show surprising creativity and inventiveness in finding why they were not wrong after all. AND, I mean, yeah, we all say that we want to spread right thinking and right ideas and all that, true. But, like with good manners, when it comes to a clash between furthering your ideals and the sheer joy of rubbing the other guy's nose in his mistakes...you know what wins invariably. The surprising thing, though, is that these days even the chap who won that argument also feels to need to parade 'I told you so'. Which means that it is now being used even when something good has happened as predicted by you. Only goes to show that people are nowadays so surprised that they got something right, probably because it happens so very seldom, that they cannot afford to let go of any opportunity to exult. There, now, I knew someday the world will catch up with me. So what if it is only on the way down?