Murphy's Law

Originally posted 14.August.2006

You've heard of Murphy's Law? We like to refer to it as Sod's Law in England, I'm not quite sure if that was an attempt to manoeuvre around a blatantly Irish name on our behalf or just a need to spice things up with our rather dry sense of English humour (if you're not sure about what this means you should probably look up where the term 'sod' comes from...), either way whomever's law it is was in full effect today. The law, by the way, for anyone who may not be familiar with it, is that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

I think I started this with the intention of listing each individual work related atrocity by line item to emphasize the sheer range of horrific events. I find now that I'm just far too tired to go into all the gory details. Instead, I'll simply say today was awful. Were I to write a poem now, it would probably be called "Untitled (A List of Events That Cause Me to Hate Everything)." I could even write a(n) haiku, although I'm damn sure that would centre around the repeated use of the word 'hate' as well. Meaningful yet compact.

So rather than continue my rant I shall depart so as to put on a new album, Eric Clapton's "No Reason to Cry" coming up (although I begin to question the validity of his assertion) and in exchange I leave you with this to chew on.

Sod's Laws and its Corallaries

(or The Twelve Laws of Inaccurate Perception)

• SOD'S LAW, ALSO KNOWN AS MURPHY'S LAW. If anything can go wrong, it will.
  
  
• O'TOOLE'S COMMENTARY ON MURPHY'S LAW. Murphy was an optimist.
  
  
• THE FIRST COROLLARY TO SOD'S LAW. Anything that is to go wrong will do so at the worst possible moment.
  
  
• THE UNSPEAKABLE LAW. As soon as you mention something, if it's good, it goes away; if it's bad, it happens.
  
  
• NON-RECIPROCAL LAWS OF EXPECTATIONS. Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results.
  
  
• HOWE'S LAW. Every man has a scheme which will not work.
  
  
• ZYMURGY'S FIRST LAW OF EVOLVING SYSTEM DYNAMICS. Once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a larger can.
  
  
• SKINNER'S CONSTANT. The quantity which must be multiplied by, divided by, added to or subtracted from the answer you get to give the answer you should have got.
  
  
• LAW OF SELECTIVE GRAVITY. An object will fall so as to do the most damage.
  
  
• JENNING'S COROLLARY. The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
  
  
• BARTH'S DISTINCTION. There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types and those who do not.
  
  
• NINETY-NINETY RULE OF PROJECT SCHEDULES. The first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90%.
  
  
• FARBER'S RULE. Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.

Accidental Pets

Originally posted on 15.February.2006

I am, apparently, the proud new owner of a lizard. I say 'apparently' because I did not make a conscious decision to own one. It's not like I turfed up at the local pet shop and said "what 'ave you got for lizards? That one there, the little brown one, I'll take 'im."   Nor was I the recipient of one of those insanely poorly planned pets-for-gifts ideas that the gift giver often believes to be the most splendid item one human could possibly present to another despite the questionable logistics and appropriateness of said animal.

"Happy Birthday! Look what I got you!" proclaims the gift giver.

"It's a cow" the gift receiver says, rather bewildered.

"I know!" exclaims the insane gift giver, grinning ear to ear. "Her name's Betsy. Isn't she fantastic? And you're always saying how cute they are when you see one."

"I live in a third floor one bedroom apartment," points out the cow receiver.

So no, I was not given a lizard by a mad family member, friend or associate. I simply acquired him through no fault of my own. He (the lizard) has, upon discovering my place conveniently located on the ground floor with direct access to patio and grass, community pool and close to shops and beaches, taken a liking to it and seems loathe to leave despite my best efforts to evict him.

I thought he'd finally left after a couple weeks holiday with us so you can imagine my surprise when sitting reading on my couch Sunday afternoon I spied him nimbly hopping from television to stereo speaker. Did you know lizards can jump? They can. Needless to say I tossed aside my book only to have him elude me between the TV and bookcase. Just when I finally had him cornered, he scampered under the couch [*exasperated sigh*]. My couch is large and cumbersome, not at all the sort of furniture one can simultaneously lift on one's own whilst trying to reach underneath with the other hand for a small evasive lizard. So I gave up, reluctantly deciding he can stay as it wasn't worth the aggravation of chasing him around.  This I decided after forty futile minutes.

Live and let live. At least that was my thought until Monday night when I fell asleep on the couch, only to be woken in the wee hours by a small brown lizard loping up my torso. 

 "OUT!" (Points at door). 

Now he's got to go. I'm designating Saturday to relocating my little lizard friend to the great outdoors. Enjoy it while you can, mon ami, moving day is coming.

Swamp Castle & Other Senseless Projects

Originally posted 3.September.2006

On the heels of a hellish few weeks I decided to relax this weekend. The trouble with this plan, and if you know me you know there is almost always trouble with one of my 'plans', is that yet again there was something to distract me in a maddening sort of fashion. Something just minor enough to seem simple and make you think you can take care of it quickly and go back to "relaxing" inevitably turns into a battle of wits of major proportions and leaves you looking harassed and mumbling unintelligibly to yourself about how you can win against this (insert choice of inanimate object here).

Such is the case with my patio. In my defense, it's poorly designed, even my Dad and brother agree with this statement. Further to my defense, I didn't design it, nor did I build it. It came with the place. The thing about it is, well, its at the complete wrong angle. Thus when it rains my patio floods up to the door. I could live with that. I could, really. The bigger problem is the landscape design is crap so the resulting flood washes mulch, dirt, mud and whatever else it can find up to my back door. Once it dries up, I am forced to sweep everything back from whence it came. This annoys me. Greatly. 

So I had a plan. I bought those decorative little fencey-thingies for putting along the flower bed and thought that would keep mulch and friends out during rain. Regrettably, the crap building/landscape debacle continued when I found cement only 3 inches down at the point the fencey bits needed to be pushed into. So scrapped I that plan. This was several months ago on a day off.

Plan B was to buy some bricks and place a layer across the opening of the patio which would stop the onslaught nasty bits. This plan emerged several weeks ago on another day off. Unfortunately, as it turned out, it wasn't high enough. Much to my consternation, the water from the flat above splashed down with enough force to somehow fling the mulch and dirt over the layer of bricks like champion bloody pole vaulters. The second problem that emerged was that the pool of water on the patio then couldn't drain back and the patio didn't dry off. *Sigh*

Well then I was off to travel and such so I've just gotten back round to the problem yesterday now that I've finally got a day off again. But, no fear, for I had a new idea. *Ding!*

I purchased more bricks and turned them on their sides to make them taller so they couldn't be pole vaulted by twigs and mulch. I then made smaller spaces between every few so that water could drain back out. Better, I declared with satisfaction. And then it rained in the afternoon...

Somehow, devious chunks of mulch and dirt found their way through my drainage holes and still my bricks were not high enough to deter them from pole vaulting activities. At this point, I began to think this project was turning into a Swamp Castle construction site a la Monty Python's Holy Grail.

It was then I devised a new strategy. Or "strat-eeg-eey", as I affectionately call them. I would buy still more bricks. This time there would be two layers of bricks on their side but the drainage spaces would be staggered so even if bits of dastardly twigs, mulch and dirt found their way through the first space... well they wouldn't be able to navigate two corners to find their way onto my patio. And I placed the 3rd set of bricks across the top of the first two, as a capstone if you will, to steady the staggered bricks and create such a height that I was certain would be over the limits of any Olympic-bound pole vaulting twigs that may train in my area. Genius, I declared last night!

And today it rained again. But not just any rain, oh no. God-like fury, end of mankind, Noah's Ark sort of rain. Rain with such force that it conspired with mulch and twigs to force a certain percentage of them through the twists and turns of my staggered spaces. Anger and threats of bodily harm to all landscapers everywhere.

So then I got still more bricks and took away the staggered spaces and filled them in. And it rained some more. (Editor's note: this is rainy season in Florida. I didn't know they had one of those but apparently we do.) And still some dirt made it through and the drainage is of course not so good. %#@*!!! Right?

I thought, do I need more bricks? Surely not, soon my patio will resemble a scene from Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" and I'll be forced to leave just a small slit through which I can spy visitors approaching and shoot arrows if need be. What? I'm English. We've got lots of castles with this technology and I've got to say slitty arrow holes help with Jehovah's Witnesses and such, no? Good idea!

Anyway, after conference call with others who have experience in these matters (read: Dad), the new-new-new plan involves going back to fewer brick design staggered drainage spaces but using netting to keep out everything except the water. Tomorrow, I'm going to buy netting. At the end of this project no doubt my Mum will ring and ask me how the relaxing is going. And I'll have to say, "well Mum, let me ask you this? Do you know anyone who needs some spare bricks?"

And now for your reading pleasure (a llama once bit my sister) courtesy of the Python lads...
King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

I-Tunes: Disc burner or software missing...
Me: It's there, the same place its been the last 1,200 times you've burned something. There! In that folder between the programme files and drivers!


Before annoying I-Tunes error:



After annoying I-Tunes error:



Final stages of 'trouble shooting' completed:




I am now well hacked off and I'm going to bed. If ANYONE has heard of a way to fix the I-Tunes error that causes the message "Disc burner or software not found" on I-Tunes as well as the insanely annoying inability to suddenly burn ANYTHING, please let me know. Even Apple's tech support forum doesn't seem to have the answer.

If not, I'd appreciate someone lending me a blow torch so I can get some enjoyment out of my laptop...

The War at Home

At precisely 8:48pm last night, an explosion rocked Pinellas county. The reverberations reached me all the way in my living room, shaking me to the core. Under normal circumstances, I would have been both astonished and horrified at the prospect of the blast originating in my own kitchen but my brother is staying with me so I wasn't quite as surprised as one might think.

"What," I cried, "in the hell was that?"

"Nothing," called back the voice in the kitchen.

'Nothing,' as it turns out, was actually an egg. A hard boiled egg to be exact, which having resided in the refrigerator until short moments before the incident, was being heated for the purposes of a quick nibbly.

My brother, it should be pointed out, is not a complete idiot. The egg heating began with 20 seconds in the microwave. I mean, how many seconds could it possibly take to heat a single cold hard boiled egg sans shell? I think 20 seconds was an alright start to be honest. Where the wheels fell off though, is when he discovered that 20 seconds did not, in fact, a warm egg make.

Enter a mild case of idiocy: rather than try half that again, he re-programmed the lone egg for another full dose and then some, 25 additional seconds. At no point did it enter his mind what might happen to a single egg micro-waved for a 45 full seconds on high.

To be fair, I hadn't exactly considered the ramifications of exploding eggs in much depth either, but then I wasn't the one programming the microwave. Fast forward.

BANG!

"What," I cried, "in the hell was that?"

"Nothing," called back the voice in the kitchen.

"That did not sound like nothing," I answered.

"Er, it was, ah, an egg…" came the trailing answer.

I ventured over to the kitchen, pleasantly surprised to note that the impact hadn't knocked frames off the wall or caused systematic damage throughout the entire area. It did, however, break plastic Tupperware with what I can only describe as 'considerable force.'

The heart of every funny story contains some element of exaggeration. The exploding egg and the Tupperware wreckage are a true story with very little exaggeration.

It would appear that the weapons of mass destruction have been hiding in my fridge this whole time.

A single egg and Tupperware lid were inadvertently harmed in the making of this blog.

Clean Up in Aisle Four!

Originally posted 22.January.2007

Collecting my mail this evening I noted a new sign tacked on the community board. "S & M Cleaning" it said. Despite an initial outburst of laughter, I composed myself and looked at it more closely and they're serious. That's the name they have apparently chosen to go by. So two options then:

Option 1:

S&M really can get so messy that you need to bring in cleaners post copulation and apparently these specially trained cleaners know the secret to removing blood and other questionable fluids from fabric and such. Where were they when Monica Lewinsky had that frightful stain on her dress? If such a thing exists, it is further evidence that S&M isn't for me... I hate a messy house.

Option 2:

And regrettably the more likely scenario, some newly arrived entrepreneur still not all that familiar with the language upon opening his 1^st business has yet to realize that if his name starts with 'S' and his partner's starts with 'M', they may not want to refer to themselves as "S&M Cleaning"...for no other reason that even the amused and satisfied customer will stop using them when it occurs to them that some desk jockey at the bank is updating their account and commenting to their co-workers and friends about the crazy customer who has to pay specialized S&M cleaners to come in once a week like clock work.

______________________________________________

Follow up from friends suggestion other potential alternatives (thanks guys)...

MB offers: Here's how it works.
The cleaners come in dressed in black leather, and fit you with a ball gag. Then, they proceed to clean your house and tell you what a dirty pig you are. Sounds like a business that would do well in D.C.

BG offers: Imagine being this newly arrived entrepreneur, and showing up at homes where the lady or man of the house opens the door... already dressed in leather, a ball gag, mask, and holding a dildo/whip.

From around the ball gag, the "host" manages to convey the words "please come in..." and our entrepreneur is just standing there on the threshold...