Edward Aloysius Murphy (1918–1990) was an aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems. Although he was a decorated soldier who rose to the rank of major, Murphy will always be remembered for his famous laws: gloomy, negative and even seemingly humorous rules that are not based on any science other than the “randomness of bad luck”. And yet at times they seem remarkably accurate, because even without official statistics they appear to hold true in a high percentage of cases.
Many people may not know this, but even when you study statistics and probability you always have to allow for a “Murphy margin” (which I suppose has some other name in mathematics). As his best-known law says: 1. “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong”, a law that was later extended with 2. “When you think things can’t get any worse, you’ll find out that they could.” Let’s look at some of his best laws, which every one of us has probably lived through at some point.
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If there are several ways of doing a job, and one of them leads to disaster, you can be sure someone will choose that way.
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When a new problem turns up, you should know that it never comes alone.
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Methods for reaching a goal more easily don’t usually work.
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When a device falls to the floor, it will inevitably land on the side where the damage can be greatest.
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When there are several queues, it doesn’t matter which one you pick: the other one will always move faster.
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The probability of spilling food on yourself is directly proportional to how much you need to stay clean.
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When you drop a slice of toast, it always lands butter-side down.
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If you’ve been waiting all day for a phone call, it will come just as you get in the shower.
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However good your work is, there will always be someone around when you make a mistake.
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The stupidity of what you do is directly proportional to the number of people watching you at that moment.
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If you have paper, you won’t have a pen; if you have a pen, you won’t have paper; and if you have both, you won’t need to write anything.
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Whatever goes wrong, you’ll always find someone who tells you afterwards that they knew how to avoid it.
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If you think about something good, it usually doesn’t happen; but if you think about something bad, you can count on it happening.
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The customer who calls every day to ask whether their appliance has been repaired will take three weeks to come and collect it once it’s ready.
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There are more waterproof watches than any other kind, but the ones that end up underwater are the ones that aren’t waterproof.
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The only time the door closes by itself is when you’ve left your keys inside.
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When you buy something, its price will immediately drop. When you sell, it will immediately rise.
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You’ll reach the phone just in time to hear the caller hang up.
As a curious fact, Robert Matthews, a researcher at Aston University in Birmingham, received the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for knocking down one of Murphy’s laws. Specifically, for showing scientifically that toast always landing butter-side down is not down to bad luck or doom-mongering, but to scientific facts.
That would overturn the law of Murphy’s laws, which said: “Murphy’s Law overrides and prevails over any other law.”
Apart from that, I’m sure more than one reader has found out just how accurate these laws can be, especially number 19, a Murphy’s law that plenty of investors have witnessed in the markets.
Watch: Never join the shortest queue
Featured image: EgoVolo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
