What rules or, if you will, laws of life do you bump into regularly? The Buttered Side Down law is a good example - that is, any piece of toast dropped has a 95% chance of landing buttered side down. Is it a collary of Murphy’s Law? On this board, we have Gaudere’s Law - any post which corrects the grammar/spelling/usage of another poster will contain its own grammar/spelling/usage error.
Here are a few I’ve determined all on my own:
Rule of Hair - all women with straight hair want to have curly hair. All women with curly hair want to have straight hair. Any woman foolish enough to be happy with her hair in its natural state will find that her hair type is out of fashion for the next two decades.
Lost Item Law - an article lost will be promptly recovered only when a) it has been replaced by something just as or more expensive, b) it is no longer needed, or c) everyone has given up and moved on.
Breakage Law - if you try hard enough, you can break anything. This includes both glass bottles of soy sauce used as an impromptu puck in a game of kitchen table hockey or lifelong friendships.
Attractive Power of Clothing - the chance of dropping staining food on an article of clothing is in direct proportion to the product of the newness of the clothing multiplied by the cost of the clothing. If you’re wearing a cashmere sweater for the very first time, it’s best to lay down a tarp over yourself when you eat.
Procrastination Rule - the only way to get some hated chore finished is to have another, even more hated chore to avoid doing. Thus, the classroom is cleaned and organized before lesson plans are done, and lesson plans are always complete before grading is tackled.
What rules have you encountered, discovered, or created?
Don’t forget that the colour of the item of clothing is directly related to its likelyhood of getting stained by food. This is the only explanation I can think of for my inability to drink coffee properly whenever I wear a white or light-coloured shirt… the darker the colour, the less likely it is to end up with a big coffee splotch.
The Take Me Seriously, Dammit! Rule: You want people to take you seriously. When they finally do, and you joke about something, they take you seriously and get offended and you have to apologize like crazy.
Traveller’s Advice #54: “Never eat anything you can’t pronounce.”
The Transport Perversity Rule: The more in a hurry you are, the more catastrophic the vehicle’s lateness will be. If you’re pressing to get to an important meeting, your car won’t start, or the flight will be delayed because they’re ‘just waiting to load the artificial sweeteners’, or the bus won’t show up, or your bike will have a flat, or you’ll get a cramp as you put on your walking shoes.
If you have all the time in the world, you’ll make all your connections, and then have an hour to spend in the waiting room, with no reading material.
I would add to this that a lost item will promptly be recovered just as you’re getting really worked up about it, have gotten well into the swearing, screaming stage and have nearly started crying (what? When this happened to me, I’d just had a kid and was a little crazy, ok?).
Other laws I’ve found to be true:
The Phone Call While Naked/Eating Dinner/Dealing with a Screaming Toddler Law - anytime you’re in a huge hurry and/or are just getting in the shower or are dealing with an extremely frustrated kid clinging to your legs while you’re trying to make him dinner is when a particularly persistent telemarketer will call or a family member will call wanting to tell you every little thing that happened to them that day. This law really applies to anytime you’re indisposed and shouldn’t be answering the phone anyway, but you do because you think it might be your SO letting you know when you can expect relief.
Law of Breakage - if it’s glass, don’t let me handle it. I’ll break it without even trying. Like yesterday when a pot of mustard fell out of the fridg onto the floor and splatted Dijon and glass everywhere.
Law of No Sleep - if it’s my morning to take care of our toddler, he’ll wake up at 3:15, stay awake until 5:30 despite my best efforts to get him unconscious, and promptly pass out when I’m getting really annoyed, only to wake up 45 minutes later when I’ve sat down on the couch to have breakfast because going to bed then is pointless anyway. This rarely ever happens to my husband. Probably because he’ll go back to sleep with our toddler.
Law of the Clean House - if you’ve managed to clean the house, someone will be along in 3…2…1… to trash it. Even if you’ve spent five hours cleaning it, it’ll all be toast in 5 minutes.
Law of Getting to Meetings on Time - it doesn’t matter how early you leave in the morning, you’ll never get to that 8:30 a.m. meeting on time unless you leave the night before. It’s just the way it is.
The “just one of the guys” law - the more strenuously someone claims to want to be treated like “just one of the guys”, the more likely that person is to recoil in horror and report the incident to HR.
I have noticed this, so I think it’s a good rule. I think I might be the exception to this rule. I have kind of odd bizarre hair…it’s mostly straight, with kind of a wave to it, except when it’s blow dried. But I like it, it suits me. It’s also super thick, so I thought it was going to be the problem where you’re snuggling with your boyfriend and it inevitably ends up in his hair.
There is no such thing as a low-maintenance woman who claims to be low maintenance. In other words, if you have to reassure people that you’re low maintenance, you’re probably not. My mom does this all the time and in response, one of her friends bought her a hat that says “Diva” on it.
Corollary to that is the Toy Package rule, which has mathematically proven that the probability of a toy’s packaging being more entertaining to the child than the actual toy is directly related to both the purchase price of the toy and the number of stores you had to go to to find the toy.
Rule of Printer Failure: You can print all you want and your printer is fine. You can print for weeks and months and it’s just fine. But the minute you need something RIGHT NOW - especially something you should have maybe printed yesterday - your printer is going to inexplicably cease to work correctly and you will not be able to print until you go through several odd rebooting/unplugging/deleting rituals until you find just the exact one that releases your printer from whatever scared state it was in, and you can finally print again.
Printers don’t like surprises, nor do they like to be hurried. They can sense your fear. It’s like they’re on mushrooms or something - all good until you surprise them, then all hell breaks loose.
The Law of the Laws of Physics Being Fickle and Hating Me - stuff happens all the time that would never ever happen if they were intended to. If a simple action hinges on force A being greater than force B, then you’re damn sure force B is greater, but should another action hinge on force B being greater, then force A will immediately increase beyond force B.
Example: I’m cutting tomatoes into pieces. When done, I want to sweep them off the cutting board into a bowl. Obviously, what happens is that they stick to the cutting board and it moves, possibly falling to the floor in the process. Now imagine that I needed to pull a cutting board using only the adhesive force between it and random pieces of tomato. There’s no chance in any realm under heaven that would work. Ergo: the laws of physics change. To spite me.
The corollary to the corollary to that is The Inverse Law of Cat Toys:
The more expensive a cat toy is, the less likely the cat is to enjoy it (large stuffed catnip mouse: $6.99–worthless. Ball of tinfoil: free(ish) and you can’t take it away from Fluffy without getting clawed)
All of these rules fall under the watchful eye of one of the gods in my pantheon: Ironius. Including:
The later you are, the more red lights you encounter.
The longer you have to wait for a bus, the more likely it is that three will come along at once.
Namely, if you get up at 5:30am and leave an hour and a half to drive to work, there will be no traffic and you will make it in 35 minutes.
However, if you sleep in a half hour and leave at 6am, you will find the highways filled with crippling molasses rivers of every conceivable vehicle you might imagine, and you will wish you’d left an hour and a half to get to work.
The bus home rule. 99 out of 100 days the bus taking me home will be on time. the ONE time I absolutely have to be somewhere at the usual time I get home will be that 100th day that we will be at least 20 minutes late.
The Law of Good Television: If I find I show that I really, really like, it must be canceled within the first 3 months of airing.
The Law of Repeats: If I have only seen a show one time in it’s entire run, then watch it again 3 years later, that show will be a repeat of the first episode I watched of it.
The Law of Ranch Dressing: Not all people that like ranch dressing are white trash, but all white trash loves ranch dressing.
Nathan’s Law: The more you’re running late in the morning, the more articles of clothing he will put on backwards and/or inside out. This law may be specific to me, or you may have a Nathan of your own.
The Inverse Time for Lunch Law: The bigger the breakfast before work, the more time you will have free for lunch.
Stop before breakfast and have a cheese omelet, hash browns, toast, juice and coffee and you will spend one hour actually working and the time between noon and five will be totally dead. And someone will bring you leftovers and someone else will bring donuts.
Have two rice cakes and a sip of water and you will be swamped with 42 must-do projects at noon and will be starving the rest of the day. And have to work late. And the kitchen will be totally nekkid.
I have only watched JAG 3 times, each time it was the episode in Australia at Luna park -part 2.
The law of Autosave: Your computer will crash, deleting any unsaved information immediately before the Autosave function would have kicked in. Doesn’t matter if you’ve set it to every hour or every five minutes, you will lose the maximum amount of writing.