Why things go wrong - Blowfish

Japan, Inc., Jan, 2003

Type the Japanese words "Mafii no Housoku" (Murphy's Law) into the google.com search engine and you'll get 12,300 hits. You can thank the Nihon Murphy Fukyukai Japan Society for the wide acceptance of Murphy's Law in Japan. Nikkei IT magazine presented in its October 2002 issue some examples of Murphy's Laws that relate to the IT sector. Here's a gander at some wit and wisdom from Japan's own Murphology mavens:

* No matter how pricey the system, its performance will promptly be eclipsed by a significantly cheaper system.

* The more important the item in a spec sheet or manual, the smaller the size of its text.

* The less time or money available to do the work, the sooner a computer will malfunction.

* The more you lean toward dependence on email for communications, the worse people will become at understanding what you have written.

* IT is a useful tool to make excuses as to why something wasn't accomplished.

* The more elaborately festooned a business plan, the weaker its overall contents.

* A computer room that can only be accessed by a security card can also be entered simply by knocking on the door.

* When you ask different computer companies for estimates, the highest costs are always applied to different items (thus rendering cost comparisons impossible).

* As soon as you turn off your PC's power, you remember there's an email you've forgotten to send.

* By the time you remember to look at your PDA, the important date that you'd entered is long past.

By the way, the Japanese rendering of Murphy's most famous law -- "If anything can go wrong, it will" -- goes thusly: Shippai suru kanousei no arumono wa, shippai suru.