Is Murphy’s Law Purely Satirical, Or Stating The Obvious, That Usually No Qc Whatsoever Is Occurring?
21 Nov
Posted by Administrator in Quality Management
Murphy’s Law – “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” – or similar statements.
Is Murphy’s Law simply a restatement that usually no quality control whatsoever is taking place and therefore if fortuitously quality occurs, it is allowed to fall back to a low water mark.
Only exception would be if someone knew something about process control, as in the following “Usually in process control a percentage limit is the benchmark. So if the limit was set at 98.5% and output quality dropped below that then the alarm bells would start ringing. It would be Quality Management’s job to get the process back on track and continuously work on improvements to raise the bar higher than 98.5%. “(as stated in a Yahoo Answer)
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The law was originally stated as:
“If there’s more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way.”
In essence, it’s an engineering principle. No matter how you try to warn people, if it is possible to do something stupid somebody will do something stupid. People stack boxes with “this end up” pointing down all the time. If it were really critical that “this end up” points up, you use a sort of pyramid shape that won’t balance properly facing any other direction (of course, pyramids are more awkward than boxes in many ways, so we settle for “this end up”.
The principle essentially amounts to “idiot-proof things even if you cannot fathom the idiot that would need it”.
It isn’t entirely unrelated to quality control, but that’s not what it’s focussed on either.
You are taking a bit of insight and fun much too seriously. Murphy’s Law is NOT the same as say Boyle’s law or Newton’s laws.
If you are into QC, read about Demming and Japan.
It has nothing to do with “QC”…. but is satyrical and explains the unexpected and unlucky.
Its purely satirical.
There is no QC when it comes to rain. And Murphy’s Law says that if you plan something outside, (a picnic for example), that it will rain that day.
Confucius must have been a relative of Murphy.
Confucius says, if you want it to rain…plan a picnic.
No, the implication of the saying is not so much based on lack of quality control as it is the difficulty of forseeing all possible circumstances, however initially unrelated, that could negatively affect an outcome. QC is an art and discipline that attempts to prevent negative outcomes from such circumstances.
I’ve read a webpage on the origin of it, it was a tongue-in-cheek way of explaining some discrepancy with the operation of a rocket sled to a group of reporters back in the 50’s. All sorts of complicated work was done to figure it out, then it finally turned out that the discrepancy was due to faulty installation of a sensor.
I’ve been biten by Murphy so often that, especially at work, I’ve learned that I can’t afford to take anything for granted. At times it has seemed that the only way to guarentee a negative outcome is specifically to not check for some ultimately fatal factor that I initially think is so unlikely that I shouldn’t have to worry about it. =8^}