Murphy's General Laws

1.Nothing is as easy as it looks.

2.Everything takes longer than you think.

3.Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

4.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.
Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

5.If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.

6.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.

7.Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

8.If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

9.Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

10.Mother nature is a bitch.

11.It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

12.Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.

13.The light at the end of the tunnel is only the light of an oncoming train.

14.Every solution breeds new problems.

15.Two wrongs are only the beginning.

16.If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

17.To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.

18.Exceptions prove the rule ... and wreck the budget.

19.Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.

20.The tough part of a Data Processing Manager's job is that users don't really know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't want.

21.Exceptions always outnumber rules.

22.To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

23.No one is listening until you make a mistake.

24.He who hesitates is probably right.

25.The ideal resume will turn up one day after the position is filled.

26.If somthing is confidential, it will be left in the copier machine.

27.One child is not enough, but two children are far too many.

28.A clean tie attracts the soup of the day.

29.The hardness of the butter is in direct proportion to the softness of the butter.

30.The bag that breaks is the one with the eggs.

31.When there are sufficient funds in the checking account, checks take two weeks to clear.

32.When there are insufficient funds, checks clear overnight.

33.The book you spent $20.95 for today will come out in paperback tomorrow.

34.The more an item costs, the farther you have to send it for repairs.

35.You never want the one you can afford.

36.Never ask the barber if you need a haircut or a salesman if his is a good price.

37.If it says ``one size fits all,'' it doesn't fit anyone.

38.You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

39.The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it.

40.Love letters, business contracts and money due you always arrive three weeks late, whereas junk mail arrives the day it was sent.

41.When you drop change at a vending machine, the pennies will fall nearby, while all other coins will roll out of sight.

42.The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

43.Experience is somthing you don't get until just after you need it.

44.Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

45.No matter which way you go, it's uphill and against the wind.

46.If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods.

47.Work is accomplished by those employees who have not reached their level of incompetence.

48.Progress is made on alternative Fridays.

49.No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

50.The hidden flaw never remains hidden.

51.As soon as the stewardess serves the coffee, the airline encounters turbulence.

52.For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

53.People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either of them being made.

54.A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

55.When reviewing your notes for a test, the most important ones will be illegible.

56.The least experienced fisherman always catches the biggest fish.

57.Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.

58.The one item you want is never the one on sale.

59.The telephone will ring when you are outside the door, fumbling for your keys.

60.If only one price can be obtained for a quotation, the price will be unreasonable.

Murphy's Technology Laws

1.You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track.

2.Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

3.Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.

4.Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

5.If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

6.The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm.

7.The attention span of a computer is only as long as it electrical cord.

8.An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

9.Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.

10.All great discoveries are made by mistake.

11.Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

12.Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

13.All's well that ends.

14.A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.

15.The first myth of management is that it exists.

16.A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.

17.New systems generate new problems.

18.To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

19.We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.

20.Any given program, when running, is obsolete.

21.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

22.A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.

23.Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss putting in an honest day's work.

24.Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

25.The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.

26.To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.

27.After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.

28.Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development.

29.A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

30.If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number.

31.Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.

32.Give all orders verbally. Never write anything down that might go into a "Pearl Harbor File."

33.Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

34.If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.

35.The more cordial the buyer's secretary, the greater the odds that the competition already has the order.

36.In designing any type of construction, no overall dimension can be totalled correctly after 4:30 p.m. on Friday. The correct total will become self-evident at 8:15 a.m. on Monday.

37.Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.

38.All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.

39.The only perfect science is hind-sight.

40.Work smarder and not harder and be careful of yor speling.

41.If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.

42.If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

43.When all else fails, read the instructions.

44.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.

45.Everything that goes up must come down.

46.Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner.

47.Any simple theory will be worded in the most complicated way.

48.Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it.

49.The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management.

Murphy's Laws Of Management

1.Think before you act; it's not your money.

2.All good management is the expression of one great idea.

3.No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong.

4.Cash in must exceed cash out.

5.Management capability is always less than the organization actually needs.

6.Either an executive can do his job or he can't.

7.If sophisticated calculations are needed to justify an action, don't do it.

8.If you are doing something wrong, you will do it badly.

9.If you are attempting the impossible, you will fail.

10.The easiest way of making money is to stop losing it.

Murphy's Love Laws

1.All the good ones are taken.

2.If the person isn't taken, there's a reason. (corr. to 1)

3.The nicer someone is, the farther away (s)he is from you.

4.Brains x Beauty x Availability = Constant.

5.The amount of love someone feels for you is inversely proportional to how much you love them.

6.Money can't buy love, but it sure gets you a great bargaining position.

7.The best things in the world are free --- and worth every penny of it.

8.Every kind action has a not-so-kind reaction.

9.Nice guys(girls) finish last.

10.If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

11.Availability is a function of time. The minute you get interested is the minute they find someone else.

Murphy's Military Laws

1.Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.

2.No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

3.Friendly fire ain't.

4.The most dangerous thing in the combat zone is an officer with a map.

5.The problem with taking the easy way out is that the enemy has already mined it.

6.The buddy system is essential to your survival; it gives the enemy somebody else to shoot at.

7.The further you are in advance of your own positions, the more likely your artillery will shoot short.

8.Incoming fire has the right of way.

9.If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.

10.The quartermaster has only two sizes, too large and too small.

11.If you really need an officer in a hurry, take a nap.

12.The only time suppressive fire works is when it is used on abandoned positions.

13.The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.

14.There is nothing more satisfying that having someone take a shot at you, and miss.

15.Don't be conspicuous. In the combat zone, it draws fire. Out of the combat zone, it draws sergeants.

16.If your sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.

Mother Murphy's Laws

THE FRANKLIN FACTOR:
Early to bed and early to rise means it's time to meet more guys.

THE RAT RACE:
If there's one rat in a room full of nice men, he'll hit on you first.

THE EYEGLASS PRESCRIPTION:
Don't wear your glasses on a blind date. You'll look better, and he will too.

THE RING RULE:
A watched telephone never rings.

THE CREEP CALL:
Never pick up the phone on Saturday night. It's a call from a creep you told you were busy.

THE FISHING FORECAST:
They say there are lots of good fish in the sea. But who wants to go out with a fish?

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROGNOSIS:
Love is a form of temporary insanity curable only by marriage.

THE ROPE TRICK:
Give a man enough rope and he'll lasso another woman.

MIND OVER MATTER:
No one ever falls in love with another person's mind at a cocktail party.

THE FAULT FINDER:
The faster way to discover all your bad habits is to move in with your lover.

THE UNINTENED RESULT:
1.Men's desire for sex sometimes results in intimacy.
2.Women's desire for intimacy often results in sex.

THE RABBIT RULE:
Only newlyweds and liars make love every day.

THE DANGLE DOCTRINE:
You can't keep a good man down.

TWAIN'S TRUTH:
Familarity breed children.

THE FERTILITY FACTOR:
Wonen are only fertile a few days each month...unless they're single.

THE PREPARATION PREDICAMENT:
The longer you spend in the bathroom preparing for sex, the more likely he's fallen asleep by the time you're ready.

Murphy's Frequent Flyers

1.No flight ever leaves on time unless you are running late and need the delay to make the flight.

2.If you are running late for a flight, it will depart from the farthest gate within the terminal.

3.If you arrive very early for a flight, it inevitably will be delayed.

4.Flights never leave from Gate #1 at any terminal in the world.

5.If you must work on your flight, you will experience turbulence as soon as you touch pen to paper.

6.If you are assigned a middle seat, you can determine who has the seats on the aisle and the window while you are still in the boarding area. Just look for the two largest passengers.

7.Only passengers seated in window seats ever have to get up to go to the lavatory.

8.The crying baby on board your flight is always seated next to you.

9.The best-looking woman on your flight is never seated next to you.

10.The less carry-on luggage space available on an aircraft, the more carry-on luggage passengers will bring aboard.

Murphy's Cartoon Laws

1.Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.

2.Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly. Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward
motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge's surcease.

3.Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter. Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the speciality of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout- perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction.

4.The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken. Such an object is inevitably priceless, the attempt to capture it inevitably unsuccessful.

5.All principles of gravity are negated by fear. Psychic forces are sufficient in most bodies for a shock to propel them directly away from the earth's surface. A spooky noise or an adversary's signature sound will induce motion upward, usually to the cradle of a chandelier, a treetop, or the crest of a flagpole. The feet of a character who is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need never touch the ground, especially when in flight.

6.As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once. This is particularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, in which a character's head may be glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously. This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning or being throttled. A 'wacky' character has the option of self- replication only at manic high speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity required.

7.Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot. This trompe l'oeil inconsistency has baffled generation, but at least it is known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall's surface to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space. The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the painting. This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science.

8.Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent. Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably afford. They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify. Corollary: A cat will assume the shape of its container.

9.For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance. This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck instead.

10.Everything falls faster than an anvil. Examples too numerous to mention from the Roadrunner cartoons.