Murphy...

[Audra]

The following article was excerpted from The Desert Wings March 3, 1978

Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will") was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base. It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash.

One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it."
The contractor's project manager kept a list of "laws" and added this one, which he called Murphy's Law.

What follows below is a list of some of the best known of "Murphy's" Laws.

* If anything can go wrong, it will
Corollary: It can
Corollary: At the most inopportune time

* 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 anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway
* If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop
Corollary: It will be impossible to fix the fifth fault, without breaking the fix on one or more of the others
* Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse
* If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something
* Nature always sides with the hidden flaw
Corollary: The hidden flaw never stays hidden for long.
* Mother nature is a b!tch.
* Things get worse under pressure.
* Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.
* Quantization Revision of Murphy's Laws - Everything goes wrong all at once.
* Murphy's Law of Research - Enough research will tend to support whatever theory.
* Research supports a specific theory depending on the amount of funds dedicated to it.

 

[Audra]

More Murphy

* Addition to Murphy's Laws
In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is going right ... something is wrong.
* Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

* It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.


* Rule of Accuracy: When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.
Corollary: Provided, of course, that you know there is a problem.
* Nothing is as easy as it looks.
* Everything takes longer than you think.
* If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
* Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
* Every solution breeds new problems.
* The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its importance.
* no matter how perfect things are made to appear, Murphy's law will take effect and screw it up.
* You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.
* The chance of the buttered side of the bread falling face down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.


* More Laws of Selective Gravitation.
* A falling object will always land where it can do the most damage.
* A shatterproof object will always fall on the only surface hard enough to crack or break it.
* A paint drip will always find the hole in the newspaper and land on the carpet underneath (and will not be discovered until it has dried).
* A dropped power tool will always land on the concrete instead of the soft ground (if outdoors) or the carpet (if indoors) - unless it is running, in which case it will fall on something it can damage (like your foot).
* If a dish is dropped while removing it from the cupboard, it will hit the sink, breaking the dish and chipping or denting the sink in the process.
* A valuable dropped item will always fall into an inaccessible place (a diamond ring down the drain, for example) - or into the garbage disposal while it is running.
* If you use a pole saw to saw a limb while standing on an aluminum ladder borrowed from your neighbor, the limb will fall in such a way as to bend the ladder before it knocks you to the ground.
* If you pick up a chunk of broken concrete and try to pitch it into an adjacent lot, it will hit a tree limb and come down right on the driver's side of your car windshield.
* The greater the value of the rug, the greater the probability that the cat will throw up on it.
* You will always find something in the last place you look.
* If your looking for more than one thing, you'll find the most important one last.

 

[Audra]

And for the techies.

Murphy's technology laws

* Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
* Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some @@@@ fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
* Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
* If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
* The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm.
* The attention span of a computer is only as long as it electrical cord.
* An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
* Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure. great discoveries are made by mistake.
* Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
* Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
* The first myth of management is that it exists.
* A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
* New systems generate new problems.
* Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
* A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.
* Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss putting in an honest day's work.
* To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
* After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
* A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
* Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
* If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
* If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
* When all else fails, read the instructions.
* The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management.
* A difficult task will be halted near completion by one tiny, previously insignificant detail.
* There is never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.
* If there is ever the possibility of several things to go wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
* If something breaks, and it stops you from doing something, it will be fixed when you:
1. no longer need it
2. are in the middle of something else
3. don't want it to be fixed, because you really don't want to do what you were supposed to do
* Each profession talks to itself in it's own language, apparently there is no Rosetta Stone
* The 2nd worst thing you can hear the tech say is "Oops!" The worst thing you can hear the tech say is "oh s**t!"
* Any example of hardware/software can be made fool-proof. It cannot, however, be made @@@@-fool-proof.
* Bahaman's Law: for any given software, the moment you manage to master it, a new version of that software appears.
- The new version always manages to change the one feature you need most.
* In today's fast-moving tech environment, it is a requirement that we forget more than we learn.
* It is simple to make something complex, and complex to make it simple.
* Measurements will be quoted in the least practical unit; velocity, for example, will be measured in 'furlongs-per-fortnight'.
* if it works in theory, it won't work in practice.
* if it works in practice it won't work in theory.
* Any wire cut to length will be too short.
* Equivalent replacement parts aren't.
* When you finally update to a new technology, is when everyone stop supporting it.
* The more knowledge you gained, the less certain you are of it.
* If you think you understand science (or computers or women), you're clearly not an expert
* Technicians are the only ones that don't trust technology