** Murphy's Technology Laws

Murphy's Technology Laws

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

• 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.

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

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

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

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

• 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.

• All great discoveries are made by mistake.

• Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

• Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

• All's well that ends.

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

• The first myth of management is that it exists.

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

• New systems generate new problems.

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

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

• Any given program, when running, is obsolete.

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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

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

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

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

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