Murphy’s Law is Always Right

I should credit a man living in our neighborhood for coming up at the right time with the simple statement I am using as a title, which perfectly sums up the last days’ events. He said this not to me, but to the partner in crime, as they were both replacing their tires in the afternoon. But let’s proceed in the right order.

It’s been a strange period, one of those periods of your life when no big occurrence happens but a series of small trivialities give you more than a reason to doubt about the Universe and its laws. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, states Murphy’s Law. And anything that could go wrong, or almost anything, did go wrong. Everything that could break, broke. Any misunderstanding that could take place, took place. Power adapters and mice exploded, vacuum cleaners committed suicide once and for all, tax office employees all of a sudden decided they were not obliged to answer questions anymore, doctors got rid of us because they couldn’t take responsibility and addressed us to somebody else. We got banned, we got dumped. We bought wrong items at the wrong time. And so on and so forth. The climax was reached last night, when somebody decided to have fun and make holes in the tires of the cars of good portion of the neighborhood where we live —  no need to say our car was not spared. At that point the aforementioned man, while giving up on replacing the tire of his own car, sarcastically but also very matter-of-factly, said, “Murphy’s law is always right”. That was the final truth. A statement that implies you cannot really do much about anything apart from hoping better times are round the corner. The episode of the pierced tire was the last in a senseless story made of misfortunes so insignificant we couldn’t really complain about, but so overwhelming in number we couldn’t help feeling cursed. And I’m not a superstitious person. We hope this is an epilogue, for now.

Tonight, a little discouraged, we went out with the dog. In spite of everything, it was a nice day. As we were walking along the sea, we looked up and we saw one of the most beautiful Aurora Borealis’ displays we have ever witnessed. It’s not nice not to be ready and equipped when something comes up. So I missed a good opportunity to take a decent picture of the amazing spectacle. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, states Murphy’s Law. Sometimes perhaps it’s our fault.