R.P. Nettelhorst

Just about everyone has heard of Murphy’s Law: “If something can go wrong, it will.” And then there are the various well-known corollaries: “Murphy was an optimist.” And, “If something goes wrong, it will happen at the worst possible moment.”

According to Arthur Bloch’s book, Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG, published in 1977, the law’s namesake was Captain Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab working at what is now Edwards Air Force Base in 1949. Block published a letter he had received from George E. Nichols which stated that Captain Murphy was frustrated with a strap transducer that was malfunctioning because of an error in the wiring of the strain gauge bridges. He remarked, according to the letter, that “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will” in reference to the technician who had wired the bridges. Nichols said that he assigned Murphy’s Law to that statement and all its associated variations.

Murphy’s law grew out of frustration, and it is usually cited with amusement when something gets messed up. It is a mistake, however, to take the law seriously. It shouldn’t even be taken as a rule of thumb. Because if Murphy’s Law were really true, if it really were one of the laws of physics, then nothing would ever go right. Life would be one huge snafu. Airplanes would not fly, and if they did, they’d fall out of the sky or run into mountains every time they did get off the ground. Cars would never start, and your computer would never boot up right and if it ever did, it would crash and lose every document and every bank transaction that you ever made–especially those that were most critical. Your bank account would then be drained of all its funds by Nigerian princes. Those Nigerian princes would, of course, immediately go to jail—since their attempt at amassing wealth, following Murphy’s dictum, must fail. And then those Nigerian princes would escape the prison, since that would be the last thing their jailers would ever want. But then, those escaped thieving Nigerian princes would promptly fall off a cliff and be consumed by ravenous wolves–who would immediately keel over from food poisoning. And so on.

Murphy’s law is easily falsifiable. For instance a friend of mine about three years ago asked me to build a computer for him. This necessitated a trip to Fry’s where we succeeded in getting all the parts needed to build a computer: a motherboard with CPU, a computer case, memory, graphics card, sound card, hard drive, DVD-RW drive and so on. With the purchase of the CPU, we were able to get a copy of the latest version of Windows on disc at a discounted price.

When we got back to my house, I assembled the parts easily, and then turned the new machine on. It booted up fine. The disc that came with the hard drive did its job of preparing and formatting the new hard drive for use and then the computer assigned the normal C and D drive letters to the hard drive and DVD-RW respectively.

When I put the Windows disc in the drive, the computer found it easily enough and began the rather lengthy process of installing the Windows operating system. It proceeded smoothly, without a hiccup, locating the sound card and graphics card and installing the right drivers for both. After the various reboots that Windows does during an install from scratch, the system came up and worked just as it was supposed to.

In putting a new computer together from scratch, the number of things that can go awry is rather high. When installing Windows, many glitches can easily occur. And yet, on this occasion, nothing went wrong and everything went right.

In science, when experiments are done it is not to prove theories right, but rather to prove them wrong: to falsify them. And all it takes for a theory to be falsified is for it to be wrong once. People were certain all swans were white. But it could not be proven true, since one could not examine every last swan in existence. But it was easily shown to be false when the first black swan was seen in Australia.

Thus, Murphy’s law is falsified every time something goes right: when you stop in time, instead of running into the child chasing the ball into the street. When the Dodgers win a baseball game. When the Clippers don’t lose. When you repair a lamp without electrocuting yourself. When you still have a job at the end of the week. When you pay off a debt. And so on. In reality, most of the time, things do not go wrong.

That’s why it’s news when there’s a school shooting, instead of when there isn’t.

For most of my life I’ve found it very difficult to tell people no. No matter how busy I might be, I seem to always want to help my friends or family if they need something done. When I was in college I discovered the hard way that saying no is sometimes the right thing to do.

Back in the dark ages before computers, we used these large bulky and noisy devices called typewriters. I had come to college with a nice electric one and I made it a point to get my papers done early so that I would not have to stay up late the night before, unlike so many of my fellow classmates. Toward the end of the first semester of my freshman year, I was quite proud of myself for having my paper for biology class done a week early. I congratulated myself on how I’d get a good night’s sleep while I listened with little empathy to the other students moaning about how they were going to have to pull “all nighters” in order to get their papers done.

One of my classmates had asked me to type up his biology paper for him. I offered this to my friends for a nominal fee, far below the going rate, more as a favor than as a means for generating income. He assured me he’d have the paper to me early in the afternoon a day before it was due. I typed fast, so it wouldn’t take me much more than an hour, if that, to type up his ten page paper, with footnotes and bibliography.

Unfortunately, I discovered that this particular friend was a procrastinator. He gave me the first four pages of his handwritten paper about eight o’clock the night before it was due, assuring me as he gave them to me that he’d have the rest to me within an hour.

Hah.

His optimistic pronouncement was inaccurate. Instead, he delivered the paper to me a page at a time, dropping off the last sheet about four in the morning.

Instead of getting a good night’s sleep, I very nearly ended up pulling a dreaded “all nighter,” catching an hour here and there as I awaited each page’s delivery.

From then on, for any future papers, I insisted that he give me the entire thing, not page by page—and he had to have it in to me by six PM the night before it was due or I simply wouldn’t type it for him. I had learned to say no, at least to him, from that night on.

He actually didn’t ask me to type papers for him very often, as a consequence. But I got a lot more sleep.

The lesson to sometimes say no didn’t really stick. After college, I’ve generally said yes to my friends and family members who request help from me. I’ve frequently helped people move, a task that I positively despise, whether it is moving an entire house or just helping someone relocate a refrigerator. I’ve helped people install various electronic gadgets, from televisions to stereo systems to new computers. I’ve even built new computers or cobbled together machines from random scattered parts.

A few years ago, I helped my wife’s parents do some more renovations on their house, which included installing new ceramic tiles in their bathroom and laundry room. One very long weekend, I pulled up the old linoleum in their upstairs bathroom in preparation for eventually installing tile in it. That same weekend I also replaced the corroded valves under their bathroom sink, and I replaced the old sink with a nice new one. This required removing the old sink, its pipes and its faucets. Then I had to cut the opening in the fake marble top to accommodate the new sink, since it was a couple inches bigger around than the old sink. I quickly found myself and the bathroom coated with white plastic dust.

Much of the weekend’s labor consisted of trying to find the parts and tools in my in-laws’ messy garage, or making trips to Home Depot to pick up what they hadn’t already purchased. Late that Sunday night, still dirty and smelly, I finally left for home just moments after I had finished with the sink. I had a two hour drive ahead of me.

Within moments of walking through my front door–still coated with white plastic dust and wanting nothing more than to take a shower–the telephone rang.

On the other end of the phone was a friend who was having trouble with her computer: it had gotten infected with a bit of malware that was blocking her ability to install a new anti-virus program. I spent about a half hour on the phone diagnosing things and finally told her to bring it by in the morning. This despite the fact that at the time I was under deadline for a book. Only then, did I finally get my shower.

Monday morning, after about an hour’s work, I was able to solve her problem and get rid of the virus in her computer.

If I know I can fix something, or do something, to help someone, I’m generally not willing to say no. Besides, I still managed to work on my book and I remained on schedule. Despite rarely telling people no, I still somehow always get my own work done on time. Showers and sleep, however, are another thing. Perhaps someday I’ll learn to say no. Probably about the time I learn how to overcome feeling guilty from knowing I could help someone and then turning them down.

At the tiny seminary where I sometimes teach, we have both on campus courses and online courses. Most of the online courses are taken care of by a man who lives in Tennessee, even though our campus is in southern California. It’s the wonder of the modern connected world. Periodically, he sends me a short email, just to ask me how I’m doing.

Not so very long ago, I got such an email. Rather than just respond with a short, “I’m fine” I decided to rattle back a list of the stuff I’m up to.

It took me longer than I expected.

When you discover just how overloaded you are, how many things are waiting for your attention, you might think that maybe one of those time management books might be helpful. I know, I’ve had that thought.

But what I’ve discovered about such time management books is that they tend to work very well for people that are already organized and detail oriented. Such people don’t really need that sort of help; they already manage things fine. It’s in their nature.

For the rest of us? I have yet to transform my life through reading about time management, or installing a time management app on my phone, or getting a day planner. Setting goals, visualization, checklists—none of them have been transformative. Instead, day planners and list making become another to do item that I’m trying to cram into my already over crammed life. And so I get to feel guilty about something else I’m not getting done.

In the end, I’m not sure that there’s a solution beyond just continuing to slog on as I’ve always slogged.

Back to my response to my colleague in Tennessee. Telling him all the stuff that I’m doing and need to do turned out to be somewhat encouraging to me. It explained to me why I was feeling so tired and overwhelmed. Thanks to the request, I took the time to take a step back. Plato wrote that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And so I suddenly had to examine what I’ve been up to. It was encouraging in a “wow, no wonder I’m feeling overwhelmed” sort of way.

Despite what the movies or TV may indicate, the life of a writer is not nirvana, paradise, or the promised land. It is simply life. Making books, writing essays, or creating short stories is just a job, with no more reward than any other job, and perhaps less, since you’re alone most of the time, no one is looking over your shoulder, and even your pay is intermittent and hard to come by. It resembles being unemployed, but without the perk of extra free time.

Then there are the normal sorts of things that happen: cooking dinner, cleaning the house, doing dishes, laundry, mowing the lawn, doctor and dentist appointments, grocery shopping, and occasional maintenance around the house.

So how do I manage my time? I just work on one task after another, and do whatever most needs doing at any given moment. There are twenty-four hours in a day. Theoretically, eight of those I will spend sleeping, but in reality I’ve not been sleeping anywhere close to that lately. Some half hour or so of my day will be spent traveling from place to place—I’m an author, so that means trips to my coffee pot. There will be some time taken by eating. The rest of that time is what is somewhat in my power to manage. And I’ve learned not to feel guilty about taking a break: websurfing has its place in my life. I only feel guilty when it takes up all my controllable hours.

Had I been interested in becoming wealthy, I suppose I might have made different educational choices. As an undergraduate, I went to a small Christian college, a liberal arts institution, where I majored in history because I was fascinated by the topic, not because I thought it had great career possibilities.

I did very well in college, becoming but the third individual in the school’s fifty plus years of existence to have graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA. My advisor encouraged me to go to the University of Chicago to pursue a graduate degree in history. However, my interests had shifted to field of study with even poorer job prospects: the study of ancient dead languages, specifically, the Semitic languages. After having spent two summers working on a kibbutz in Israel, three years studying Biblical Hebrew and Old Testament, I decided that studying the languages and literature of the Ancient Near East was the thing for me.
So I applied to and was accepted into the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. I chose to major in Semitic languages.

I was expected to focus on three language areas. Two were required: Hebrew and Aramaic. For the third language focus, I had the option of choosing either Arabic or Akkadian. Given that my reason for learning these languages was my fascination with the Bible’s Old Testament, I of course opted for Akkadian, the dead language that dominated the ancient Near East rather than the living language that dominates it today.
What’s Akkadian? It is better known by its two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian and was spoken in what is today Iraq from about 2000 BC until around 600 BC.

Once you’ve learned one Semitic language, the others are relatively easy to pick up, since the basic grammar and vocabulary is mostly the same for all of them. Sort of like how knowing Spanish makes learning Portuguese, Italian and French relatively easy, since all those languages evolved from Latin. Likewise, all the various Semitic languages descended from a common root.

Nevertheless, Akkadian is a bit trickier to learn than the other Semitic languages. Not because the grammar or vocabulary is any tougher, but because of its nightmarish writing system. Whereas Hebrew and Aramaic are both written with a 22 letter alphabet, Akkadian is not. Alphabetic writing systems allowed for widespread literacy. The Akkadian writing system, in contrast, made literacy rare and ensured the continued employment of the scribes who alone could read and write. Akkadian uses a writing system originally developed for a different and unrelated language: Sumerian.

The writing system that the Sumerians developed and that the Akkadian speakers adopted is known as cuneiform. It was written on mostly pillow-shaped clay tablets that could be easily held in one hand. The scribes used a wedge-shaped stick to make impressions in the clay, leaving wedge shaped marks (the word cuneiform means “wedge writing.”) The cuneiform writing system is incredibly complicated. Each symbol represents either a whole word, or for a part of a word—a syllable. Reading cuneiform is like reading a rebus, where for instance one might write the phrase, “I believe” by drawing a picture of an eye, a bee, and a leaf. Thus, the first picture is a homonym of the pronoun “I,” while the word “belief” is represented by symbols that individually could be understood as an insect and a part of a tree, but in this context represent the two syllables of the word “believe.” The entire Akkadian writing system functions in this way, so that every tablet you read is a complex puzzle.

It gets worse. There are about 650 different cuneiform symbols. And each of them is polyvalent—that is, each symbol can be read more than one way, with some having upwards of twenty or more possible readings or meanings. And you thought English spellings were hard! Understanding what a given cuneiform symbol means is dependent upon the historical period when it was written, its genre (that is, whether it is a religious text, an economic text, poetry, or history), and the context of the symbol—that is, what are the symbols around it. So for instance a symbol that can represent the name of the goddess Ishtar, might also be read as the word “god,” “heaven,” “sky,” or simply as a syllable in some other word.

Akkadian was but one of the thirteen languages I ended up studying during my graduate program at UCLA. Not all were Semitic languages directly related to my major. For instance, I took two years of Sumerian and a couple of quarters of ancient Egyptian just because I had the opportunity. I would have enjoyed studying more Egyptian, but the class conflicted with Ugaritic, which was a required course for my major.

Obviously learning all these peculiar languages was hard—especially given that I was also working 40 hours a week driving a shuttle bus at the Burbank Airport. And often I was studying four or more languages at the same time.

No possible job achieved as a consequence of studying these dead languages could ever come close to making me rich. Had I wanted to be rich, I should have studied engineering, science, or medicine—or maybe majored in business or economics. My educational choices were about as economically reasonable as betting the rent money on a game of three-card Monte. On the bright side, I do know how to ask, “do you want fries with that?” in several languages…that no one speaks anymore.