MURPHY'S COROLLARY

You all know about Murphy’s law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” I believe there is a corollary to that: “Nothing will be completed with only one try; if it does, you are allowed to faint.”

The first inkling I had of this was when we were in Turkey. A very large “membership” box store had arrived in town, much on the order of Costco but even larger. Our young driver had suggested to us that we might want to join it, as we were having to buy all kinds of things for the furnishing of our flat and being able to find many of them in one place would be an advantage. He said he would call the store and find out what was needed to join. He gave us the list of what the store membership department said we would need to take with us, and we set about collecting the information.

On the day we set aside for the trip, Ahmet picked us up, ascertained that we had everything we needed and off we went. The big box store was on the far side of the oldest area of the city, and we were on the far end of the newest area. The drive from our place to the big box store was on a “ring road” that made a huge arc between the two areas and it took almost an hour’s drive to get from our house to the store.

We arrived at the store and laid out our documents as requested. We were turned down. We were turned down, Ahmet told us, because we did not have a little booklet from the Belediye meclisi – or the town council in the area of the city (Goztepe) where we lived. Ahmet asked why they hadn’t told us that. The answer he received was, “You didn’t ask.” They were adamant. No booklet, no membership. Those at Jerry’s place of employment who were setting thing up for us had just not gotten around yet to getting done this bit of bureaucratic trivia. It took about 2 weeks to clear up, and finally Big Box allowed us to join.

That was in 1992. It took a while for my corollary to make its way to the United States, but in recent years I’ve discovered that it is almost impossible to get anything done in only one shot. If you buy something and start to install it, you will find that you need XXXX. If you go to the bank to open an account, you will need something that is at home. If you are promised that pants you have taken to the cleaners for altering will be done on Thursday, they will not be ready when you arrive and necessitate a trip back on Friday. If you need five items from the drug store, they will only have 4 of them. Honest to God, anymore it takes at least two tries to get any one thing done.

I hate to admit this, but I think the e-world has caused this to happen. As much as I hate to say it, I believe computers and allied e-equipment have so overburdened us with multitasking and information that as a culture we are losing the ability to focus our attention like we used to. I have lowered my expectations because my aggravation level was getting way too high. Now I just assume I will have to do something twice before it is done, and I have given up on expecting a “doing it right the first time” result so I am much less aggravated now. I may not like it, but I know I can’t do a darn thing about it, so I have simply stopped sweating it!

What brought this diatribe about is that I am changing my internet connection from one provided by our apartment complex to AT&T. It’s a little more expensive, but at least it will be more reliable than the one we’ve been using, one whose latest problem ended up with having no internet for 3 days. So AT&T sent me the equipment and instructions and said that my equipment could be set up any time after Tuesday night at 8 p.m. But nothing works the way it should, and not all the phone calls in the world have elicited from AT&T any indication of when I will be able to get connected. It’s the old “we’ll call you within 3 hours” that doesn’t happen; then “You’ll hear from us in 1 to 8 hours,” but no phone call ever comes.

So I’m sure it is the corollary hard at work.