Harry Roberts—web developer and standards advocate

Murphy’s Law…

Murphy’s Law states that ‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’ Today, I felt first hand, the effects of Murphy’s Law…

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

1. Firstly, I needed to do some maintenance work on my bike. My bike cost well over £1000, so any work I do on it, I do carefully. That said, the particular task I was carrying out requires a 5p bodge—placing a 5 pence piece over a certain hole in the inner workings over the pedal system in order to get yourself some leverage to remove the pedals. This 5p got stuck, and it got stuck bad. Lodged in such a way that it wouldn’t come out, nor could I get anything back on. It was a definite rock-and-a-hard-place moment! Luckily I managed to bash the coin out with an allen key and a spanner!
2. I live in an apartment right in the centre of Leeds, so naturally it’s not that big. The upshot of this is that instead of having washing machines in the apartments there is a laundry room in the complex with washers etc in. I put a load in and went through the above ordeal whilst my clothes were washing. I then went down to the laundry room when my phone timer went off to find that instead of having cleaned all my stuff, the machine had in fact broken down, and was slowly filling with murky, nasty water in front of my eyes, with the clothes sloshing round and no way of opening the door. I managed to get to the mains switch and turn the machine off and get my stinky wet clothes out, before waiting over 20 mins for the next machine to come free. Waste of time and money.
3. After popping the washing on again I decided to sync a load of Suze’s photos to my iPad, only for iTunes to decide to do its own thing and sync all my iPhone apps over to the iPad. This is the same thing it did first time I synced it, and the same thing I spent an age undoing.
4. Being a bit of a fatty lover of food, I decided to look to my epic meal of chicken pittas with lettuce, cucumber, cheese, onion and salad cream and hot sauce as something to look forward to. The lettuce I bought yesterday also went out of date yesterday, making the meal pretty dry and distinctly less tasty than it should have been.

That was all within a few hours of each other, from getting in from work ’til about 8pm. I’m not sure what else is going to happen to me today, but I’m not looking forward to it :(

Tags: Food, iPad, Trials | No Comments »