The Adventures of TinTin and Snowy: Murphy's Law

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Murphy's Law

In my line of work, you tend to become an avid believer of Murphy's Law, "If anything can go wrong, it will". You'd think that after so many scrapes with Murphy's Law, that I'd have got a wee bit wiser. However, what never ceases to baffle me, is the consistent appearance of flaws in prototypes ONLY when you're giving a presentation to someone. Why? Why? What kind of sick-semi-conductor-silicon-based-God would allow this to happen? What other explanation can you give for a system which works splendidly and like a dream all the time you put it through various extreme test conditions but fails to even perform its basic function when its put in front of a potential buyer? All we can do is shrug and say "That's Murphy's Law for you".

I just managed to get a prototype over to one of our Dutch clients in Netherlands and lo and behold, a perfectly working system (that's why I sent it...it was the best unit we had) goes to Amsterdam and conks out there for no apparent reason. A Dutch SIM card that was working perfectly fine here in the UK refuses to work in Amsterdam where it was initially purchased. A system that I tracked throughout its journey on the back of a TNT truck suddenly stopped giving out its location as soon as it crossed the English Channel. How bizarre! It was in this mood that I googled for Murphy's Law and I found a few appropriate laws :

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 something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop. Corollary: It will be impossible to fix the fifth fault, without breaking the fix on one or more of the others.
The Murphy Philosophy: Smile . . . Tomorrow will be worse.
Quantization Revision of Murphy's Laws: Everything goes wrong all at once.
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.