Today would have been the 107th birthday of one Edward A. Murphy, Jr. the lawyer; well the namesake of Murphy’s Law, the basic engineering principle that “If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it” (or, in other words: “If anything can go wrong, it will”).
There is a really interesting multi-part article that I would link to on how that came about - from rocket sled testing for the design of military ejection seats; however, the link is broken.
I never knew that was the original quote. I paraphrase that as “if something can go catastrophically wrong, some idiot will come along to cause just that.” IOW blame is assigned to a random incompetent fuckup and not chance or providence.
The original point wasn’t pessimism; it was engineering advice. Basically, you should design things so that they can’t be done wrong.
The original context was an experiment with a bunch of sensors attached to cables, and every single cable was plugged in backwards, which resulted in no data whatsoever from that run of the experiment. A Murphy-compliant cable would either have had an asymmetrically-shaped plug so you couldn’t plug it in the wrong way, or control circuits that could correctly interpret the sensors no matter which way they were plugged in.
"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you still have their shoes” - Jack Handy
I recommend the book by Nick T. Spark. It used to be called The Fastest Man On Earth - Why Everything You Know About Murphy’s Law is Wrong, but apparently it being sold now as A History Of Murphy’s Law.
