- Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
- Murphy’s Corollary: Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
- Murphy’s Second Corollary: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
- Murphy’s Constant: Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.
- Quantized Revision of Murphy’s Law: Everything goes wrong all at once.
- O’Toole’s Commentary: Murphy was an optimist.
While working on his computer earlier today, PG was reminded of Murphy’s Law when he was almost ready to allow a disk drive cleaning program to remove a great many files on a hard drive that the program decided were “unnecessary, redundant, outdated” or otherwise no longer needed.
Suffice to say, in more than one earlier life, PG has acquiesced to such a request only to discover that almost all of the files the drive cleaning program removed were no longer needed on PG’s computer. Discovering exactly which of the 100,000 deleted files were needed after all has never been the best use of PG’s time.
PG’s Supplement to Murphy’s Law:
It is always cheaper to buy a bigger hard drive than it is to figure out which files that the drive cleaning program just deleted turned out to be necessary after all.
PG is blessed with some very intelligent heirs. Should they wish to organize/clean up/sanitize/correct/detoxify/etc. PG’s hard drives after he departs this world, they will be welcome to do so.
For the time being, PG has has three terabytes of internal storage and 16 terabytes of external storage up and running on the master computer at Casa PG and just discovered a nicely-priced external 18 terabyte hard drive on Amazon, so he is unlikely to be forced to tidy up any bits and bytes soon.
And, given the possibility of local disasters, so far, online storage space located somewhere on the internet beyond the spacious grounds of Casa PG appears to be even more extensive.
The Delete button on PG’s keyboard will never gather dust, but the scope of its domain will remain limited to characters, words, the odd paragraph and an occasional draft version of a finished document saved in at least two other places.