Getting it right

Most of us know someone who lacks the ability to get things done. The world is full of them. Others, the suggester-ers, may resort to name-calling, tears, comparisons with so-and-so (usually a relative on their side of the family), even mild hysterics. All to no avail when it comes to the likes of the person I know...

This person is splendidly unique in the way he remains completely unflappable, no matter what. He's been around a bit you see. Knows the score. That one thing can lead to another, and usually does. His mind is stocked with flaws within any suggestion regarding work made to him. The very first time he heard Howe's Law, that says:

Every man has a scheme that will not work,

he adopted it as his own but changed 'man' to 'person' of course, to conform with the politically correct way of thinking these days.

To forestall any possibility of him accepting a hint, challenge, threat, etc, to do something a suggester-er believes he should do, he uses a particular phrase. As if in thought, he allows his forehead to crease, he nods his head, looks the suggester-er in the eye and murmurs, "Yes I can do that. Later. I'll do it later." He calls it Joe's Law, and found that 'later' seldom arrived.

Now he knows through many encounters with his domestic suggester-er, that she will fume for a while, which is the subconscious recording of her mother reminding her:

You'll get little help from your Joe around the house. He's as thick as two planks, like the rest of his family...

Of course Joe up and leaves the scene. Well, he's knows it's better not to hang about when the record of her mother is playing, subconsciously, obnoxiously or otherwise.

I'm grateful too that Joe passed on other Laws he'd learned. They fit a surprising number of awkward situations: domestic, political or rural, very well. Like this one that James Payne wrote in 1884:

I had never had a piece of toast,
Particularly long and wide,
But fell upon the sanded floor,
And always on the buttered side.

Mr James Payne doesn't tell us how he reacted to this. I know it never bothered our Joe. I've seen him pick up toast or other food he'd dropped, laugh and murmur, "Well, bugger me," give it a quick wipe across his trouser leg and consume it without another thought of bacteria or bacterium. He never came to any serious harm that I'm aware of.

I did disagree with Joe, however, about Maier's Law, which says:

If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.

Now while that's quite humous and as good an explanation of how some certain folk deal with problems, in the field of aeronautics, for example, it would be dangerous to give it serious head room. Some research brough to light a certain George Nichols, project manager for Northrop Aviation in California, USA. He developed an idea from a remark he overheard from Captain E Murphy of the Wright Field Aircraft Research Laboratory. It was to do with the valve in an aircraft's hydraulic system. As they discussed the pros and cons of this particular valve, apparatently Captain E Murphy said, "Oh, anything can go wrong when it comes to designing things," or words to that effect.

(And that reminds me of this quote of Alan Shepard's that Joe told me recently:

It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of proverbs suggests that George Nichols changed what he heard in the 1940s to:

If anything can go wrong it will go wrong.

Since I felt George thought the same way I do, I changed it to:

If anything can go wrong it sodding-well will go wrong,

for colour and effect, and I'm sure George would approve.

In the case of Joe, it's probably the reason why he always said he'd "do it later." He'd learned that by deferring doing anything because of the possibility of things going wrong, the need for it had either already passed or it had been completed by someone else.

By the way, I've just learned a new law which I must pass on to Joe. It's called Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics:

Once you open a can of worms, the only way you can re-can them is to use a larger can."

Dennis Crompton © 2001