Murphy

After working as contractor for different IT companies, I have discovered some interesting patterns. When you want to take time off, contract offers will come to you, unsolicited. When you want to work, all opportunities will elude you. If you only have one contract offer, it never meets your requirements. The lower the number of requirements met, the less likely it is to have alternative offers. When there is more than one offer, the best contract offers are never confirmed until the least appealing deadlines to accept it, expire. If you turn down the least appealing contract in favor of the more appealing ones, the latter will always fall through. However, if you do take the least appealing contract -and as soon as it is too late to back out- you will receive a phone call with a definitive confirmation for one of the contracts that did meet all your requirements.

This seems like another manifestation of Murphy's Law: "if something can go wrong, it will". The truth is, there is no such thing. The real Murphy's Law is that when things happen as we expect, we don't much remember them. In the highway of our memory, it is the occasional bumps on the road that stand out, while we barely register the long, uneventful stretches of good road.