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Who is this guy named Murphy, and why does he have a law named after him that can thwart one's every move? I don't know. All I know is, in everyone's life, some poop must fall. I'm Jim Pulling, and this is my view from the middle. Okay, so I'll explain the poop-falling story as it relates to this in just a moment, but here's a little inside baseball on how I produce these podcast episodes. I know it seems magical and I don't want to burst anyone's fantasy bubble about it. Yeah, right. But I have a bedroom in my house that, besides being a guest room, is also my recording studio. In this room, I have an audio console, microphones and stands and interfaces for my laptop, For Christmas last year, my daughter made a sign that lights up that says Jim's Recording Studio. I'm the only one who ever sees it, but I still turn it on when I'm recording just to make it all seem official somehow. The room is also our music room where I have my piano and my wife has her guitars, but we're not going to go there today. I record these things usually on Tuesdays. Why Tuesdays, you may ask? Well, I'm glad you did. Well, you see, Tuesdays are the only days of the week when there are no lawn crews outside my house that blast their mower and trimmer motors through the non-soundproof walls of my house and interfere with the recording. I do have some sound-absorbing panels in the room, but they don't help with outside noise. Every other day of the week, with the possible exception of Sunday, there's a lawn crew outside, either from my yard or one of my neighbor's. Tuesday is also the only day of the week when my wife doesn't use the washer and dryer, which are right across the hall from the studio. The noise those machines make can interfere with these recordings as well, and Mondays are out because, well, I'm out doing other things. But still, there are issues. Seems I'll get all set up to record on a Tuesday, open the mic, and From outside come the dulcet tones of a trash truck grinding up a couch or something. Or maybe the city of Orlando public works truck had chosen that day to pump out the sewers. Or maybe an especially low-flying, noisy plane is traveling over the house. Or maybe an ice cream truck, yeah, we still have those, is playing its music as it meanders down the street. Or maybe one of the long crews got delayed and had to do a neighbor's yard on Tuesday. Welcome, my friends, to Murphy's Law. Murphy's Law is a popular adage that states anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The phrase is attributed to aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr. Following a mishap during a rocket sled test in 1949, Murphy coined a rule for safe engineering. The quote is, if there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way, end quote. The phrase somehow morphed its way into present-day vernacular as anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It's like when your air conditioner is working perfectly when it's 68 degrees outside, but as soon as the temperature hits 97 degrees in the month of July in Florida, that's when the A.C. takes a dive, forcing you into a $ 1, 200 repair bill. Murphy. Or you've had several weeks of perfect weather, but the day you plan an outdoor event with your friends and family, that's when the rainstorm hits. Murphy. When you drop a piece of toast on the counter, why does it always seem to land butter-side down? Murphy. Why is it you only find your keys, passport, hairbrush, whatever, after you've paid to have them replaced? Murphy. I have found that there are many offshoots to Murphy's adage that can creep into everyday living. Take, for example, I have a kitchen that is approximately 300 square feet. The bowl of a spoon is approximately one-half square inch. My big toe is about a half inch square as well. How is it that when the one half square inch spoon falls off the counter, it doesn't hit anywhere else in the 300 square foot kitchen, but right directly onto my one half square inch toe? When this happens, I say, and I quote, ow. Of course, there are a few other descriptive terms introduced there as well. Murphy. Okay, so here's the poop story I talked about at the beginning. The location, Bath, in the rural ceremonial county of Somerset, England. In 2024, while walking through the streets of Bath, I was attacked, strafed actually, by a bird that had been saving up its bowel movement to the precise moment and place to let its payload loose on me. I was one of a dozen people on the sidewalk that day, but the bird chose to crap on me. And I'm telling you, this bird had to go. Ruined my backpack. I wound up trying to clean myself up in the tiny bathroom of an ice cream parlor with nothing more than toilet paper and a bottle of liquid hand soap. Murphy. There are more subtle offshoots of that law, too. In this day and age, iPhones, iPads, laptops, etc., there are a million different variations on the connectors used for these devices. USB-A, USB-C, USB-Mini, USB-Micro, 1.5-inch mini-plugs, RCA, BNC, XLR connectors, standard two-prong AC plugs, Three-prong AC plugs and the list goes on and on. And almost without exception, the first time I grab a connector and try to plug it in, I have it oriented incorrectly and have to flip it over every darn time. Murphy. Why is it when I have to sneeze and grab for the tissue box, it's always on the last clump of tissues in the box, and in my panic to stave off the snot barrage, I grab the tissue and the whole box goes flying through the air and across the room and I wind up sneezing in my hand. Sheesh. Murphy. Why is it that I can spend several hours with my cell phone in my pocket or on the table next to me and never get a call? But the minute I get up and walk two rooms away and upstairs, that's when the phone rings. Murphy. Or if you're Marty McFly and you have mere seconds to get the DeLorean up to 88 miles an hour so Doc Brown can send you back to the future, that's when the car battery dies. Well, okay, that's a movie, but you get the gist. Now, I'll bet you didn't know this. There's an antithesis to Murphy's Law. called Wyfrum's Law. It's actually just Murphy spelled backwards. It's Y-H-P-R-U-M. It was coined by Harvard professor Richard Zeckhauser. I guess he knew how to spell things backwards and probably didn't want to call it Zeckhauser's Law. But Wyfrum's Law says that everything that can work will work. The best and most famous example of Wyfrum's Law is was the Apollo 13 mission to the moon. It was dubbed the most successful failure of a mission because they improvised so many things to get the astronauts home, using the lunar module as a lifeboat and constructing a makeshift carbon dioxide filtration system using everyday materials they had on board. Wyfrum's law can also be touted in the field of science and technology, discoveries like penicillin, a happy accident. Now, the story you may have heard was that it was discovered in a pot of boiling water, but that's an old wives' tale. Actually, what happened was a fellow by the name of Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, left a petri dish sitting out in his lab when he went away on vacation. When he came back, he found that a stray mold spore had grown on the dish. Fleming isolated the mold, recognized its antibacterial properties, and called it penicillin. The pacemaker was another accident that stemmed from electrical engineer Wilson Greatbach's efforts to build a device to record heart sounds. Turns out he screwed up and installed a resistor with the wrong value. This caused the circuit to generate a steady pulsating rhythm similar to a heartbeat. Voila! The pacemaker was born. Now here's one you probably didn't realize. In 1935, a British engineer named Robert Watson Watt was asked whether it was possible... that the Germans were developing a death ray using radio waves during World War II. Turns out no such weapon was actually being made, but in studying the possibility, Watt ended up creating the world's first radar detector, one of the biggest technological advances of the war. In my life, I can attribute Wyfrum's Law to my radio career. I had wanted to be in radio broadcasting since I was a kid because I wanted to be a disc jockey. And after 40 years in the business, I did essentially everything there is to do in radio broadcasting, except be a disc jockey. And that turned out to be a good thing, because disc jockeys have no job security at all. They get fired at the drop of a hat. The path I wound up taking, journalism, then management, turned out to be much more stable, and I stayed at the same job in the same company for 36 years. It was a God thing. I talked about this before, and God applied Wyfrum's Law. God sets up the barriers on each side of the road that bump us back into the straight and narrow when we start to veer away from the path he wants us to take. God also applies Murphy's Law, but I think that's just a source of entertainment for him. Yes, there we all are in the middle. I think God smiles when he redirects meticulously planned out innovation failures, paths that us mere mortals have set for ourselves, Apollo 13, Penicillin, The Pacemaker, into major breakthroughs through Wyfrum's Law. that guide us along the path He has set out for us. But I also think that sometimes God enjoys watching me scream and blurt out, let's call it inappropriate language, when Murphy's Law makes that spoon nail my toe. He also has fun cueing the trash truck outside my recording studio just as I open the mic, or watching me get strafed by a diuretic bird, proving once and for all that, in everyone's life, some poop must fall. I'm Jim Pulling, and that's my view from the middle.