The Walk of Life

My 3rd speech at Toastmasters

Hi friends. A very good afternoon to all of you! Remember those days when you have an important interview and get stuck in a traffic jam? Remember those days when you start a few minutes late from your home and miss the office bus because it was a few minutes earlier than usual? My point is, sometimes things go wrong, that too at the most inappropriate moments. And you don’t know whom to blame. Take heart, because after my speech, you’ll know exactly who is responsible for all the miseries in your life.

It’s not fate, it’s not God. This villain is called Murphy’s Law. Unlike other complicated laws which you take a lot of time to understand, this law is very clearly-worded. It simply states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. That means that if there is even a 0.1% probability that something can go wrong, it will go wrong in the worst possible manner.

The law owes its origin to the American Air Force. In between 1948 and1949, the American Air Force took up a project to study human deceleration. They wanted to test how many Gs a pilot could withstand in a crash – where one G is the force of gravity acting on a body at sea-level. Earlier estimates said that it was 18Gs. However some crashes during World War II proved otherwise. These estimates were used in designing aircrafts. So if the earlier estimates were incorrect, lives of many pilots were unnecessarily at risk. These tests were being conducted by Colonel John Stapp, a physician, U.S. Air Force colonel and Flight Surgeon.

During the tests, questions were raised about the accuracy of the instrumentation used to measure the g-forces. Edward Murphy, an American aerospace engineer, proposed using electronic strain gauges to measure this force. The sensors were wired. But guess what? They showed a zero reading. It turned out Murphy’s assistants had wired the sensors incorrectly. This prompted a disgusted Murphy to make the pronouncement “If there’s any way they can do it wrong, they will.”

This was how the law was born. But just how did the Law get out into the world and gain public attention? Well, John Paul Stapp held a press conference a few weeks after the incident. And he was attempting to explain his research in clinical terms when a reporter asked the obvious question: “How is it that no one has been severely injured — or worse — during your tests?” Stapp replied nonchalantly that, “we do all of our work in consideration of Murphy’s Law.” When the puzzled reporters asked for a clarification, Stapp defined the Law and stated that “you have to think through all possibilities before doing a test” so as to avoid disaster. If anything can go wrong, it will. It was a concept that seized the cumulative imagination at the press conference. So when articles showed up in print, Murphy’s Law was cited right along with Newton’s Second.

As time progressed, people found that this rule is ubiquitous. It is all-pervading. Every person I know swears that their lives are governed by this one single rule. In fact, so many people are affected by it that over the years, this law has been quoted in thousands of articles and news reports, been the subject of several books, appeared as the title of a movie and a TV show, and inspired about a dozen zillion corollaries, or correlated laws. I would now like to tell you about a few of those dozen zillion corollaries, which will make it clear to you how this law affects every aspect of our life.

Murphy’s Law governs your love life. You see a beautiful girl or a handsome guy at a party. This is THE person you had dreamt of all your life. You go and introduce yourself to this person. And the next thing you know, you are being introduced to this person’s spouse. After all, there is a corollary which says “All the good ones are taken.” “And if the person isn’t taken, there’s a reason.”

There are laws that pertain to your job. Maybe your job is well-paying, but it bores you to death. Maybe you found a job description which was fun, interesting and high-paying. You went to interview for it, and you didn’t get it. The following quote sums it up aptly. “The job you want is well-paying, interesting, fun, rewarding, conveniently located, or attainable; pick one.”

All of us who are automating test cases face a peculiar problem. When you don’t have any deadlines to meet, when you don’t have any urgent tasks to finish, the stage will work as if it never had any load problems. However, you have some important test case to deliver and you’ll find that someone has uninstalled Silk from your TPA, or better still, you cannot connect to your TPA at all. Your stage will not work, you will need to file a ticket and you’ll take hours trying to find what ticket to file. A saying sums it up correctly “If something breaks, and it stops you from doing something, it will be fixed when you:
1. no longer need it
2. are in the middle of something else
3. don't want it to be fixed, because you really don't want to do what you were supposed to do”
And there’s a law which developers would certainly identify with. It says “Bugs will appear in one part of a working program when another 'unrelated' part is modified.”

And speaking of the theme of the day, there is a corollary to Murphy’s Law which sums it up aptly. It says “Anything good in this world is either illegal, immoral or fattening.” It very clearly brings out the fact that temptations are what we want to do, and they maybe different from what we do. The key is to strike the correct balance between the two.

To sum up, it might seem to some people that I am taking a very pessimistic view of life by saying that everything in life has to go wrong. However, to me it is a reminder that life can be defined just as much by its inherent challenges as anything else. These challenges make life enjoyable. Murphy’s laws just help us to take it all with humour. :)