Re: Murphy's Law: (was Re: off-topic: scheduled backup to external hard drive

["George Scithers" owlswickpress@xxxxxxxx]

Well, I actually corresponded with the real Ed Murphy, United
States Military Academy, class of 1943, formerly a Major, USAF,
when he was a civilian in quality control at Hughes and I was the
editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. (Murphy never
made LtCol and is listed in the Academy' Register of Graduates as
neither "resigned" nor "retired," bit I carefully avoided
discussing that.) A science fiction author of my acquaintance
(the name escapes me at the moment) who also worked at Hughes
later interviewed him for an article on the Law. According to
Murphy Himself, his original remark was (approximately) "If
there's anything the contractor's technical representative can do
wrong, he will," referring mostly to putting things together
wrong. Murphy Himself intended to do an extensive article (or
book) on the Law, mostly on what to do about the tendency of
people to do things wrong unless doing so is too much more
trouble than doing them right.

George H Scithers
USMA Class of 1950, by the way . . .
----- Original Message -----
From: "Norman Bauman" 
To: 
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: Murphy's Law: (was Re: off-topic: scheduled backup
to external hard drive


[snip]
I've spent years trying to track down Murphy's Law, and I will
refer you to
the Murphy's Law web site and Wikipedia entry. Murphy's law
seems to have
split into 2 tracks: it's developed into first a joke, about
the peversity
of nature, and second a design principle, that many people will
use your
product many times under many circumstances, and you have to
design your
product to work right every time (rather than blaming the user
for doing it
wrong). I prefer the second.
[more snip]