I have borrowed from these, as well as from assorted scraps of paper in my files, to compile this list of the 101 greatest Murphy's Laws, along with corollaries in some cases. For a discussion of why things, as opposed to people, sometimes go wrong, take a look at Prof. Frank Lambert's discussion of the second law of thermodynamics . To get to a specific category of laws, select one of the links below. Or feel free to simply page down and browse. If anything can go wrong, it will.
Nothing is as easy as it looks.
Everything takes longer than you think. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.