During the last long weekend, on a public holiday, with three of our children visiting for the weekend, our geyser suddenly stopped producing warm water. Murphy’s Law?! Could the geyser not rather break a week earlier or a week later or in the middle of the week when all plumbers and electricians were doing business?
Similarly, chances are good that a toothache will strike on a Friday afternoon and when you call the dentist, they tell you they are fully booked till the next week Wednesday.
Or on a Saturday morning on your way to town, your motor vehicle will start making disturbing noises.
Murphy’s Law states, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” My experience is that Murphy’s Law also has to do with the timing when problems will occur. Therefore some people add the phrase “… and at the worst possible time.”
But who was Murphy and what is the story behind this Law that is actually not really a law?
Legend has it that the phrase originated in the military, from Air Force captain Edward Murphy, who served at an Air Force base in 1949.
The Air Force was testing high-speed jets and Captain Murphy once complained about one of the technicians serving under him on the project, saying “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.” Soon, people on the base were referring to things going wrong as Murphy’s Law.
Nowadays there are many different variants of the original. Perhaps you can identify with some of these Murphy-related incidents.
In the business world you may find that:. If something is confidential, it will be left in the copy machine.. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will occur.. If, of the seven hours you spend at work, six hours and fifty-five minutes are spent working at your desk, and the rest of the time you make idle talk with a co-worker, your supervisor will walk in and ask what you’re doing within that five minutes.. Success occurs when no one is looking, failure occurs when the manager is watching.. The remaining work to finish in order to reach your goal, increases as the deadline approaches. . It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.. If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.Computers also have a life of their own. To err is human, but to really mess things up requires a computer.. Any cool programme always requires more memory than you have and when you finally buy enough memory, you will not have enough disk space. . A bad sector disk error occurs only after you’ve done several hours of work without performing a backup.. No matter how good a deal you get on computer components, the price will always drop immediately after the purchase.. Software bugs are impossible to detect by anybody except the end user.. The speed with which components become obsolete is directly proportional to their price.. As soon as a still-to-be-finished computer task becomes a life-or-death situation, the power fails.
But Murphy’s Law is to be found everywhere, not only in business and computers.
. You’ll always find something in the last place you look.. All warranties expire on payment of the invoice.. No matter how long or hard you shop for an item, after you’ve bought it, it will be on sale somewhere cheaper.. Any tool dropped while repairing a car, will roll underneath to the exact centre.. The repair man will never have seen a model quite like yours before.. When a broken appliance is demonstrated to the repair man, it will work perfectly.. You will remember that you forgot to take out the rubbish when the rubbish removal truck is two doors away.. A clean tie attracts the soup of the day.
But such is life. Nothing in life is perfect. Fortunately, we have the ability to look at the bright side of things, to smile about Murphy’s Law, without being thrown off course.
Some people even reckon that Murphy must have been an optimist. Let us be likewise.* David Malherbe is a freelance writer and lives in Langebaan.
