Murphy's Law and Its Progeny | Hacker News Reader

Murphy's Law and Its Progeny

zira.home.xs4all.nl

Some of my favorites:

> SECOND LAW OF APPLIED CONFUSION

    Truck  deliveries that normally
    take one day will take five when you are waiting for the truck.

> MALEK'S LAW

    Any simple idea will be worded in the most
    complicated way.

> BALLANCE'S LAW OF RELIABILITY

    How long a minute is depends
    on which side of the bathroom door you're on.

I have a shitty Whirpool fridge. It has taught me a few others:

- If a product offers a warranty, it will be a pain in the ass to claim against it

- A lifetime warranty is only true for creative interpretations of “lifetime”

- The limits of any limited warranty are well before any condition that requires a warranty claim

- if a product is going to break, it will do so no less than 1 day and no more than 90 days after your warranty expires

- If service is provided in fulfillment of some warranty agreement, it will not be provided on terms that accommodate your schedule.

- Corollary 1: the service technician will invariably need to reschedule last minute to an even less accommodating time

- Corollary 2: when the service technician arrives, they will invariably inform you that they lack other the parts or expertise to resolve the issue

The "lifetime" warranty on Jansport bags definitely uses a creative interpretation of "lifetime", but in the consumer's favor. I ended up making a warranty claim on a external frame bag that I inherited from my grandfather after his death, such that the bag had outlived not only the purchaser, but also the retailer it was bought from, anybody involved in manufacturing it, the product line it was from, and rapidly it would seem the entire product style.

is there one for the inevitability of catastrophe during a big presentation?

hence the ritualistic offering to the 'demo gods'

(personally i break something on purpose right before the demo, so that the 'something will go wrong' had had already 'gone wrong', but i'm now in a much better position to fix it live (no troubleshooting your own bug))

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