Well, Murphy called on me a week back after I determined to make a start on clearing the leafy debris of autumn from the landscape.
The silver birch and the great ugly branched brutes of unknown origin down the back have begun nature's colourful (and messy) journey into the months of winter, which in itself is quite strange.
Because one would expect things that live outside over the cold months to actually put on more of a coat, not completely discard them.
But it's all something to do with cutting loose old growth and hunkering down to create new growth in a few months' time.
So there I went, rake in hand and empty wool fadge in tow, and spent an hour or so raking everything into neat, dry piles.
Piles I decreed would the following day be piled into the fadge and a few empty cartons (because there was more of it than I thought).
I suspect Murphy had watched my enthusiastic yard-clearing endeavours, for that night a remarkable gale-force wind emerged from the northwest and effectively put every leaf and twig back where they had been in the first place. And more than that, they brought down another few cartons' worth of leaves to put the icing on Mr Murphy's cake.
Ah well, I just had to do what a chap just has to do when faced with such a dilemma.
I gave up. Nature can dissolve the leafy wreckage at her own leisure. And hey, there's something noble about letting nature carry out such tasks naturally.
So I stayed inside and looked up Murphy's Law.
It seems that the line "if anything can go wrong it will" is slightly off the original mark, although it pretty well sums things up.
For the actual determination of Murphy's Law is that "if there are two or more ways to do something and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it". It transpires that a chap by the name of Edward A. Murphy Jnr, who was an engineer working for the US Air Force in the late 1940s, was part of a team tasked with developing rocket-sled devices that would test human acceleration tolerances.
One experiment called for the fixing of 16 acceleration monitoring devices to the body of a volunteer who would be propelled at great speed upon the sled. This was duly done ... although it must be pointed out that the sensors could be affixed in two ways and yep, whoever carried out this mission put them all on the wrong way around.
This later led to Murphy delivering the line about "two or more ways to do something", and it was later quoted by the test subject at a news conference.
And so it stuck.
The statement was effectively referred to as Murphy's Law.
If there are two ways to do something, someone will inevitably do it the wrong way.
Yes, if something can go wrong, it will.
Murphy's Law thus began to be used across the whole landscape, even as far as a leafy suburb in Napier.
And even on several roads in that seaside town - for if they are going to tear up some roads, they will tear up the ones you use every day to get to and from town.
And bemusingly, these "roadworks" appear to get carried out on stretches of road that do not appear to require any work in the first place.
They tear the top off, replace it, and it looks ... exactly like it did before.
So I took a different way the other morning and, yep, more road works.
Whichever way you decide to go, you will encounter roadworks.
He is a busy fellow, this Mr Murphy.
- Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
