The Best 50 of Murphy's Law

(The Best 50 of Murphy's Law)

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

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

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Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool

discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.

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

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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,

then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

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

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

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

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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.

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All great discoveries are made by mistake.

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Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

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Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

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All's well that ends.

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

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The first myth of management is that it exists.

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

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New systems generate new problems.

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

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

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Any given program, when running, is obsolete.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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

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The faster a computer is, the faster it will reach a crashed state.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.

Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.

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

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Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume,

humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

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

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

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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.

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

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All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.

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The only perfect science is hind-sight.

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

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

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If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

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When all else fails, read the instructions.

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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.

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Everything that goes up must come down.

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

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

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

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

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