Murphy’s Law in Real Life
I never met Professor Murphy but I’m very aware of his famous or infamous law: “What can go wrong will go wrong.” To my knowledge, Charlie Brown never once kicked the football while Lucy held it and jerked it away at the last moment.
This isn’t about the Negative Nellies or Debbie Downers. It’s simply a reminder of things going wrong at the wrong time. We all experience these times.We often laugh to keep from crying.
The car warranty is for 100,000 miles. As soon as the odometer rolls over past 100k, you start hearing a knock from under the hood and oil stains in the garage. After visiting the dealer, you realize the bill is $3,298 to get the car fixed. Why couldn’t this have happened 2 weeks ago while it was still under warranty?
The freezer only goes out when it’s full of prime steaks, not ground round. It’s never the passenger side windshield wiper that goes out. Only the driver’s side. The only time you decide to lock your car is when the keys are left on the car console IN the car. Thanks, Mr. Murphy.
I have played and coached in games where Murphy was in total control. The sure-handed running back loses the grip on 3 possible touchdowns, inside the red zone. We played Cincinnati one year while at Louisville when they squib kicked the kickoff after they had scored first. The football hit our front man in the leg, bounced back to them and they scored shortly after. We were down 14 points and our offence hadn’t even touched the ball. We never caught up.
Of course, in athletics, if one team has everything going bad, the other side is on the opposite end of the spectrum. In the 1991 Fiesta Bowl where Louisville beat Alabama 34-7, everything went wrong for Bama and everything clicked for Louisville. It was so bad that we (Uof L) got accused of running up the score.
Last night, Auburn won the NIT basketball championship by beating Tulsa. The Tigers led by as many as 21 points, but Tulsa kept chipping away and took the lead by 3 with very little time remaining. All Tulsa had to do was get the ball inbounds to basically end the game. They took longer than 5 seconds to inbound the ball giving it back to Auburn with less than 5 seconds remaining in the game. The Tigers hit a 3-pointer to send it to overtime. After that, you could put the chairs in the wagon because Tulsa couldn’t do anything right and Auburn couldn’t do anything wrong. AU got a well deserved championship.
On Saturday, I witnessed Murphy’s Law with our horses. Susan and I decided to take more than a 2-hour trail ride through the pines in northwest Florida. One of the brads/screws in my bridle was lost. We stole one from another tie down strap to repair it. We saddled up but Dan, my walking horse was fighting the bit which indicates a problem. We realized we had put the bit and curb chain on backwards.
This meant undoing the entire thing and turning it around. My wife, Susan “Macgyver” can fix anything horse related. We didn’t have a screwdriver so she used a knife as the screwdriver. Luckily, no injuries there. It’s pretty common for us to work our horses out in the roundpen before riding off. The automatic popup sprinklers in the paddock and round pen were supposed to be programmed to go off at 2 am, not 2 pm. At exactly 2 pm, I got my left boot in the stirrup and was swinging my right leg over the saddle, the sprinkle head directly under my horse popped up and sprayed. Dan jumped sideways and by sheer luck, I came off on my feet. (At my age, I have the flexibility of a cedar board.)
It gets worse. Since the saddle had slipped, it made it loose. This meant untying the leather strap to the cinch. As I tightened it (you guessed it) it tore in half. Here comes Macgyver back to the rescue. I don’t know what she did, but I was able to mount up and ride on.
Naturally, we had to try some trails which hadn’t been totally cleared. This meant vines, stickers and thorns had to be dodged. Dan is more than 16 hands and can and will plow through anything. As he started through the vines, one with thorns, not stickers, wrapped around my left arm. Get the picture: a thick vine with thorns is around my left arm, my right hand is holding the reins and saddle horn, Dan is dancing in circles trying to get away from the vines and I’m bleeding like a stuck hog. I looked like I had been in a fight with a roll of bobwar and the bob war won.
Susan was smarter. She dismounted from CoCo and walked through the vine and thorn maze. Two hours and many miles later, we made it back to the barn. If Dan could talk, he would ask “aren’t you a little too old and heavy to be doing this to me?”
I thought about renaming Dan.
He would never forgive me for calling him Murphy.
But, it’s the law.