Murphy's Law

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”


Desperate times call for desperate measures; and when one resorts to such desperation, everything suddenly starts going haywire. It's as if everyone has conspired to work against you and the whole net just keeps getting tighter until you're drawn into a sense of hopelessness and only left with the little luck that you can't hope for then.

I need some forms signed. I have very little time on my hands. And what happens is a series of unfortunate events. A flat tire. A bad axle. The mechanism needs to be taken apart and carefully seen and put back without modifying them in the slightest. Can't drive too fast because the road is blocked by a lorry in front of which is a bus in front of which is another bus. I have very little time left. Then of course comes the usual spree of running around in the campus looking for the right signatures. A lady in the bank denies doing a transaction because she is just too damn busy. She directs me to another officious man. He directs me back to her. My patience is now running thin. I have begun cursing all of these evil-doers. May the government go to hell for all I care! Everybody is simply senile. Then ensues an argument with the same lady who directed me back to the same man to whom I did not now go.
Then luck happens for a while. There do exist nice people who would go out of their way to see the job done for someone else in distress and with a rather enraged purple-red face. Of course, it doesn't end there. There's so much more work because I study in a government institution. A man at the counter won't take my ID for my mark sheet because he is busy talking to other men all huddled up at the next counter. After what seemed like an hour of his deafened yapping, he starts opening a toffee. And if I have seen little children with clumsy fingers yank the wrapping off in freezing cold faster, I would not be lying. A simple matter of seconds can be warped down to the speed of a snail crawling across a meter long space. A lot of swearing ensues which is of course, not heard by the slug-like man but by everyone else in the vicinity. And then paperwork. Unnecessary paperwork that only government institutes find necessary because elsewhere, computers have taken over. Shoddy work is being done by fat people sitting at desks collecting fat paychecks.

Everything does work out in the end, though. But it can't be done without a terribly distressing experience of Murphy's Law. There will always be an obstacle even when things seem to start going well. There will always be another problem waiting around the corner. And nothing, absolutely nothing ever has a straightforward solution. And this is only a small part of the horrendously intricate and puzzling impediments this law throws us into.