Subject: Murphy’s Laws (Page 9)

No matter how many hot dogs you consume at home, they always taste better at the ball park.

Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.

Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it.

Folks playing leapfrog must complete all jumps.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

No experiment is ever a complete failure – it can always serve as a negative example.

No experiment is reproducible.

Never try to replicate a successful experiment.

Things go right so they can go wrong.

A cigarette placed in an ashtray will go out if you stay in the room; if you leave the room, the cigarette will topple to the table, burn through, and drop to the floor, where it will smolder until it descends to ignite the drapes in the room below.

The one who snores will fall asleep first.

Success means only doing what you do well, letting someone else do the rest.

When a person says that, in the interest of saving time, he will summarize his prepared statement, he will talk only three times as long as if he had read the statement in the first place.

Envelopes and stamps which don't stick when you lick them will stick to other things when you don't want them to.

In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.

(1942 – ) British travel writer & novelist

If you play with anything long enough, it will break.

Never, ever, fly on the airline of the country from which you are departing.

No boss will keep an employee who is right all the time.

Recoilless rifles – aren’t.

Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.

A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.