farmdoc's blog post number 155

Captain Edward A Murphy (1918-1990) was a US Air Force engineer. He was working on a project to determine how much sudden deceleration a person could stand in a crash, when one day he discovered a wrongly wired transducer. He cursed the technician responsible and said: ‘If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it’. The project manager, who kept a list of ‘laws’, added this one which he called Murphy’s Law. I was reminded of Murphy’s Law last Thursday when I was splitting some firewood. I knew there was a buried water pipe in the vicinity, but I didn’t know exactly where. Well now I know, because one of my downstrokes went right through the piece of wood and up shot a gusher. I quickly stanched the flow by turning off the header tank’s gate valve. Then after digging up the pipe I inspected the damage which I mended with a joiner. Our Mole Creek property is 78.16 hectares (193.14 acres), and I hit the jackpot. (Un)lucky me. Talking of stanching the flow, Murphy’s Law has done the opposite, i.e. spawned a multitude of other laws – similar but different. I wonder which one of these will test me next. And why couldn’t that infernal technician have wired the transducer properly? Don’t answer that – it’s a rhetorical question.