标签: murphys

As I mentioned in an earlier blog , my chum David Ashton from Australia tells me that his local Microchip Technology representative includes a "Joke of the Month" in his communications.   David often forwards these jokes to me. I particularly like the funny ones (LOL). The last one was titled Murphy's Laws, Part 1 , which sparked my blog Expanding Murphy's Law .     Well, I just received an email from David with the subject line: Murphy's Laws, Part 2 (or "Part Deux" for the French speakers amongst our number). The contents of this email were as follows:   Murphy's Laws: Part 2 You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. All great discoveries are made by mistake. Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget. A meeting is an event at which minutes are kept and hours are lost. A failure will not appear in a unit until after it has passed final inspection. Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even which book. The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman. 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. Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.   Several of these brought a wry smile to my face, but the one that really struck a chord was #7. How about you? Have you had any real-life experiences that directly map onto one of these "laws"? And can you suggest any additional items we should add to the list?

My friend David Ashton from Australia tells me that his local Microchip Technology representative includes a "Joke of the Month" in his communications. David was kind enough to share this month's chuckle with me as follows:   Murphy's Law: Part 1 Nothing is as easy as it looks. Everything takes longer than you think. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then. If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. The light at the end of the tunnel is only the light of an oncoming train.   Now, I always thought that the namesake of Murphy's law was Capt. Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab. But I was just reading this Wikipedia entry , which notes that: "The perceived perversity of the universe has long been a subject of comment, and precursors to the modern version of Murphy's law are not hard to find."     With regard to Capt. Ed Murphy's claim to fame, the Wikipedia goes on to say: "According to the book A History of Murphy's Law by author Nick T. Spark, differing recollections years later by various participants make it impossible to pinpoint who first coined the saying Murphy's law .   Now, do you recall my blog The 10 Commandments of Electronics ? If so, you will remember that we had a lot of fun augmenting this with our own offerings. So let's do the same for Murphy's law -- can you think of any additional items that should be added to the list above?