Jeff Adams

You’ve heard of it, haven’t you? Murphy’s Law? The concept is also called Sod’s Law or Finagle’s Law. The basic concept of Murphy’s Law is “if anything can go wrong, it will.”

No one really knows the origin of Murphy’s Law. The concept has been around as long as the human species has inhabited earth, but the name Murphy’s Law goes back to 1952, or maybe a bit earlier depending on whose story you accept. You can read a bit about the concept and its history here or even here. If you really want to get dpressed, just Google “Murphy’s Law” and be prepared to read for a while.

I do not want to whine or complain or get you to feel sorry for me, but sometimes Murphy’s Law just sneaks up and kicks me hard in the behind. I’ve had some very good times this past week. But, I have accomplished absolutely nothing of what I thought to accomplish. The simple things became complicated. The unexpected became expected. I spend my week doing a variety of things that I had not planned on doing — things I’m glad I could do, but not all at the same time. I normally plan for a few unexpected things to happen, because they always do. It’s just that sometimes the heavens open and torrents of unexpected and unexplained things rain on me from above soaking all of my good intentions and plans to the bone.

Just for fun, I found some notes I made many years ago on corollaries of Murphy’s Law:

• Nothing is as easy as it looks.
• Everything takes longer than you think.
• If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
• If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong and circumvent these, than a fifth way will develop.
• Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
• Whenever you set out to do something, something esle must be done first. But you will never know ahead of time.
• If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will.
• If you do something which you are sure will meet with everybody’s approval, somebody won’t like it.

There are hundreds of those corollaries out there — there is just so much that can go wrong! Or, as another corollary says, “Every solution breeds more problems.” Maybe you have a favorite you’d like to share.

While no one seems to know for sure where the phrase “Murphy’s Law” originated, it seems that most agree on how Mr. Murphey met his untimely deminse. It seems his car ran out of gas somewhere in the United States on a dark night. As he tried to hitchhike to a gas station, wearing white and facing traffic, he was struck from behind by a British tourist driving on the wrong side of the road.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Purely Personal, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.