Murphy's Law

BLOG 128 - Friday, May 8, 2009

Murphy’s Law – you know it, I am sure – “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong”. I became acquainted with this principle early on in life and it has been substantiated over and over again through the progression of time. The law, like most laws, is non-discriminatory as well as broadly applicable – it affects us all and applies to everything. It could apply to a traffic signal – you know how it turns red at the precise moment so that you will either have to either gun it through the intersection on ‘orange’, risking citation by the local constable, or slam on the brakes, threatening personal impalement on the steering wheel or accidental passenger ejection through an open window. It could apply to checking out of your local grocery, observing the number of people in each line, selecting the shortest line, later to discover it to be clerked by the slowest cashier, thereby making it the longest line. My father, a mechanical engineer by profession, constantly used geometry, algebra, calculus and physics, each discipline loaded with laws, rules, and corollaries to laws and rules. Originated by him, allow me to share something of my father with you – he called it, “Larrison’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law” and, simply stated is, “Murphy was a dad-blamed optimist”. Between my grandfather and my dad, there was ‘an old saying’ for nearly everything. I believe it was a Grandadism that he shared as “some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you”. Friday was a toss-up between a ‘bear day’ and a ‘Larrison’s Corollary’ day – I hope yours was better!