A couple of days ago, during some remodeling, the construction worker drilled ‘a bull’s-eye’ into an electric cable in the wall, under plaster, leading to the light switch. For many years now I call a situation like this one ‘the principle of minimum comfort’. Here is the story:

When I was a physics freshman, in the lab, I (as well as my fellow-students) encountered, probably for the first time in life, the enormous assortment of possible failures in our experiments. Like, if anything can go wrong it goes wrong. At the time, none of us was aware of Murphy’s Law so someone described the phenomenon as ‘the principle of minimum comfort’, in line with the ‘minimum’ principles we were bombarded with: minimum energy, minimum distance, etc. I like the expression and I stay with it.

Although, the basic Murphy’s Law "If anything can go wrong, it will" really can’t be surpassed in clarity and beauty. Nowadays there are dozens of variations of the law as well as corollaries. In particular, I like one of them: