HIGH LIFE : Murphy’s Law: If Anything Can Go Wrong, It Will

“Have you ever received a phone call the minute you sat down on the toilet?” writes Arthur Bloch in the introduction to his book “Murphy’s Law.”

“Has it ever started raining on the day you washed your car, or stopped raining just after you bought an umbrella? Perhaps you realized at the time that something was afoot, that some universal principle was just out of your grasp, itching to be called by name.

“Here is the first compilation,” he says “of the wit and wisdom of our most delightfully demented technologists, bureaucrats, humanists and anti-social observers, prepared and presented with the purpose of providing us all with a little Karmic Relief.”

MURPHY’S LAW:

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Corollaries:

* Nothing is as easy as it looks.

* Everything takes longer than you think.

* 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.

* If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop.

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

THE MURPHY PHILOSOPHY:

Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.

As applied to Academiology:

LAWS OF APPLIED TERROR:

* When reviewing your notes before an exam, the most important ones will be illegible.

* The more studying you did for the exam, the less sure you are as to which answer they want.

* 80% of the final exam will be based on the one lecture you missed about the one book you didn’t read.

* The night before the English history mid-term, your biology instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria.

Corollaries:

* Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor’s course.

* If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.

* If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.

ROMINGER’S RULES FOR STUDENTS:

* The more general the title of a course, the less you will learn from it.

* The more specific a title is, the less you will be able to apply it later.

ROMINGER’S RULE FOR TEACHERS:

* When a student asks for a second time if you have read his book report, he did not read the book.

“If you can’t laugh at yourself, make fun of other people.”

--Bobby Slayton, comedian