When Life Hands You a Lemon-Shaped Rock

I have rediscovered an interesting phenomenon. Well, it’s interesting to me, anyway. It’s the idea that if you have two cars and one breaks down, it’s always the one with the full tank of gas when the other one is running on fumes. Having experienced this exact thing twice in the past month, I hereby claim authority to name this principle. I think I will call it… the “Stupid Crap Breaks at the Worst Possible Time” principle. I know, it’s a breathtakingly eloquent name, and you’re all thinking you could never have come up with it yourself.

I suppose this could fit under Murphy’s Law, but that’s just “anything that can go wrong, will.” This is a little more specific. Perhaps we could call it Paragraph 2 of Murphy’s Law.

I think my favorite illustration of this is that the night I always get the least amount of sleep is Sunday night, which sets me up for exhaustion the whole rest of the week.

What’s your favorite example of this?

Comments

Jer said…
It does fit under Murphy. As an expert on Murphy's Law, I have found that there are countless subsections that are more specific, such as "The broken appliance always works perfectly when displayed for the repairman" (substitute appliance for computer, power tool, girlfriend, etc)

My favorite Murphy specifics include "The power outage will always happen as you type the last sentence of your 50 page paper", "There will be free donuts at the office on your sick day" and "The company will give out bonuses the week after you quit" (all of the above have happened to me, sometimes more than once)
July 23, 2007 at 10:34 AM
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