— as compiled by Bill Purdin
— Compiled and Edited by Bill Purdin
(But, remember, just when you think you know all the laws, another one appears.)
| 1. | If anything can go wrong, it will. |
| 2. | Nothing is as easy as it looks. |
| 3 | Everything takes longer than you think. |
| 4. | Doing it the hard way is always easier in the long run. |
| 5. | Research will always tend to support your theory, if you do enough of it. |
| 6. | If success is at first not achieved, every effort will be made to hide the fact that it was even attempted. |
| 7. | People who smile when things are going wrong have already thought of who will get the blame. |
| 8. | Your superiors will always think they are better than you, despite the law of averages. |
| 9. | The truth shall get you fired. |
| 10. | If you cannot convince people, confuse them. |
| 11. | If everything is coming your way, watch out. |
| 12. | If people listened to themselves more often, they would talk a lot less. |
| 13. | Trust only those who stand to lose as much as you do when everything goes wrong. |
| 14. | The shortest distance between two points is usually under construction. |
| 15. | In any organization there will always be one person who knows what is going on. This person must be fired, or at least avoided at all costs. |
| 16. | A knife too dull to cut anything else will always cut your finger like a razor. |
| 17. | After your hands have become extremely dirty, your nose will itch. |
| 18. | Leftover nuts never match leftover bolts. |
| 19. | In case of doubt, say it loud and convincingly. |
| 20. | The length of a minute depends on what your are waiting for. |
| 21. | When a man says to you “It’s not the not the money, it’s the principle of the thing,” it’s always the money. |
| 22. | The number of people who happen to be watching you will always directly proportional to the stupidity of the thing you are doing. |
| 23. | Things always get worse before they get better. |
| 24. | Bad weather reports are right more often than sunny ones. |
| 25. | If it jams–force it. Then, if it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. |
| 26. | The first place to look for something is the last place you expect to find it. |
| 27. | The driver’s side windshield wiper always streaks and wears out first. |
| 28. | In human affairs it is impossible to make anything fool-proof, so don’t waste a lot of time trying. |
| 29. | As soon as you switch lanes, your old lane speeds up. |
| 30. | The worse the haircut, the slower it grows out. |
| 31. | Phone messages: If you have a pen, there’s no paper. If you have paper, there’s no pen. If you have both, it will be a wrong number. |
| 32. | The slowest drivers all know the fastest shortcuts. |
| 33. | When you try to prove to someone that a machine doesn’t work, it will always work perfectly. |
| 34. | Law of Corporate Planning: Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to really plan anything. |
| 35. | When the world solves one problem, the solution will usually create another problem, far worse than the first one. |
| 36. | Progress is the endless exchange of one problem for another. |
| 37. | Being punctual only means your mistake will be made on time. |
| 38. | 2nd Law of the Corporation: Any action for which there is no logical explanation always is already “company policy.” |
| 39. | Whatever plan you make, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere that will derail it. |
| 40. | A surprise monetary windfall will be accompanied by an unexpected expense of the same or a greater amount. |
| 41. | The one emergency for which you are fully prepared will never happen. |
| 42. | When taking something apart to fix a minor malfunction, you will cause a much greater malfunction upon reassembly. |
| 43. | All great discoveries are made by mistake. |
| 44. | If it looks easy, it’s tough. If it looks tough, it’s impossible. |
| 45. | No matter how early you get there, someone else is always there first, or else you’ve got the times screwed up, or it’s the wrong day. |
| 46. | The effort of trying to save a falling object by catching it will always cause more destruction than if the object had just been allowed to fall unobstructed in the first place. |
| 47. | The most expensive and hard to replace component is always the one that breaks first. |
| 48. | No one can ever leave anything well enough alone. |
| 49. | If you don’t really have to do it, and if doing it or not doesn’t matter at all, it will go perfectly every time. |
| 50. | As soon as you mention something … if it’s good, it goes away … if it’s bad, it comes upon you immediately. |
| 51. | The first 90% of project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes at least twice as long. |
| 52. | Inside every large problem is many other small problems struggling to get out. |
| 53. | If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then that is the one that will be chosen. |
| 54. | All work expands to fill the time allowed. |
| 55. | There is never enough time or money. |
| 56. | The greastest thing about teamwork and study committees is that they can disperse the blame. |
| 57. | Whatever happens, look as though you intended it to happen. |
| 58. | No two identicial parts are ever truly identical. |
| 59. | There is no limit to how bad things can get. |
| 60. | When things go wrong, they go wrong all at once, and at the worst possible moment. |
| 61. | If everything seems to be going along well, you have definitely overlooked something. |
| 62. | Whenever you start to do something, you quickly realize that something else must be done first. |
| 63 | The likelihood of success is inversely proportional to how important the project is. |
Edward A. Murphy, Jr.Born in 1917, Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the United States Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject’s body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount. Of course, somebody managed to install all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original and unknown form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) paraphrased at a news conference a few days later. Within months, “Murphy’s Law” had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering, and finally reached the Webster’s dictionary for the first time in 1958. Tragically (and perhaps typically), the popular cliche we refer to as “Murphy’s Law” was never actually uttered by Edward Murphy. So, Murphy’s Law applies to Murphy’s Law, too, of course. The traditional version of Murphy’s Law (“anything that can go wrong, will”) is actually “Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives.” Finagle’s Law was popularized by science fiction author Larry Niven in several stories depicting a frontier culture of asteroid miners; this “Belter” culture professed a religion and/or a running joke involving the worship of the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy. Since then, the relentless truth inherent in Murphy’s Law has become a persistent thorn in the side of humanity. And, we fear, it always will. That is the one thing you can count on. |