Sunday, May 2, 2010

MURPHY!

Alright, consider these 15 situations and statements, tick if you have experienced it before or agree with it.

  1. When you are studying, the longer you look at the page, the more the words don’t go in.
  2. In the supermarket checkout, the person ahead of you in the queue, will have the most complex and longest checkout transaction possible.
  3. The only tunes that you can’t get out of your head are the ones you shouldn’t have let in.
  4. A heavy, ugly, useless bag/box/case has sat in the dark corner of your cabinet for 10 years. The day after you throw it away, you need it urgently.
  5. In the dark, there’s always one more stair than you thought.
  6. Often when someone tells you this is “good for you”, it means “yucky”.
  7. In a football match, if your team is winning, then the last 10 minutes of the match lasts like an hour.
  8. A watched pot never boils.
  9. The more important the word document is, the more likely the computer will crash and you are more likely to have not saved it before the crash.
  10. You will always discover errors in your work after you have submitted/printed it.
  11. The only day which you don’t have your raincoat/umbrella with you, is the day when it rains.
  12. The door squeaks loudest when you need to be quietest.
  13. The bigger the bargain in a shopping sale, the more money leaves your pocket.
  14. The earlier you plan to leave, the later you will actually leave.
  15. If you lose something that is replaceable (textbooks, utensils, clothes, etc.) as soon as you buy a replacement, the original will surface.

Did you tick most, if not all of them? Doesn’t surprise me. Welcome to the world governed by the “Murphy’s Law”.

Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Mathematically, it’s just a consequence of the concept of: given a sufficiently long time, an event, especially for bad occurrences, which is possible, will happen anyway. To extend the statement:

Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong

Whatever can’t go wrong will go wrong

Trying to make things better only make things worse

Any attempt to do nothing, so nothing can go wrong, will go wrong

Murphy’s law is just a consequence of human nature, which includes

(a) being impatient,

(b) erroneous,

(c) always yearning for perfection without putting in any effort and

(d) tend to only notice/remember extraordinary, bad events.

For example, for item number 2 above, firstly, it’s because of you being impatient and secondly, you will only agree to this because you only remember all the long checkouts in front of you at the supermarket because they were bad experiences, but don’t actually remember all the quicker ones, which possibly happened more frequently than the odd long ones. Thirdly, long check outs usually happen when all people shop at the same time, if others do the shopping at a particular time, then it’s really likely that you will shop at that particular time, and hence the crowd and long queues always happen on you.

Take item 12 for example, why don’t you want the door to squeak? It’s likely that you don’t want anyone to notice, especially during dark and quiet times, usually at night, but it’s the quietest time of the day, and you are acting sneakily and don’t want anyone to know, so no matter how careful you open the door, it will squeak anyway, and no matter how soft is the squeak, you will think that it’s too loud, because you feel guilt-ridden and your focus of that time is on the door, thinking “don’t squeak, don’t squeak!” And also, it’s the quietest time of the day. But it is actually a normal squeak (just like a squeak during the day), it is just your mind telling you that it’s quite loud that it might wake people up or something.

Take another example, item 14, firstly, people who actually will plan to leave early are those who know they are often late, so they will be late anyway. Secondly, even if you are a punctual person, you will tend to remember only those instances when you were actually late because being late is something that is not normal to you and you will always tend to think that you are not punctual enough and therefore agree with the Murphy’s Law.

Now, from your experiences, can you think of a Murphy’s Law yourself?

Corollaries of Murphy’s Law:

(1) No news is good news.

(2) In a system, the more number of elements there is, then there is more problem.

(3) The more time you spent on fixing a problem, then there is more chance to have more problem.

Conclusion: As the world grows more complex, it caused more problems. Most of the time human minds still stay Paleolithic, but are using semiconductor age technologies. This is to say that it’s a stone age mind reacting to a plastic age system, and hence the 4 features of human nature stated above are being exposed by Murphy’s Law. In other words, as the world becomes more developed, then more human weaknesses will be known or developed. Hence, no one can escape from Murphy’s Law!

1 comment:

阿蓝 said...

sorry fung, i think i ticked 4-5 boxes only.. :p