Murphy’s Law Made Manifest*

Murphy’s Law was made manifest in my life in one day more times than I want to count. From my now defunct Dot Mac Homepage blog, January 21, 2005.

I give up. I give in. I am definitely going to get myself a cell phone.

Here I am at home when I was supposed to be at the Rochester Institute of Technology introducing the speaker, media scholar Bob Jensen at an event I worked hard to make happen through the Democracy Now! committee of Metrojustice. I was supposed to introduce him!

Earlier in the day, when I took Jensen in to RIT for an informal meeting with students and faculty, my car started acting up. As I was driving (it was snowing, btw), I noticed that my windshield wipers were operating awfully slowly. When we parked, Jensen suggested I should try starting the car immediately. It wouldn’t start. I joined the gathering for a while, then left and called campus security for a jump, then went out to wait for them. It was bitterly cold, and I had a doctor’s appointment I needed to get to — with a rheumatologist (and those appointments are scarce as hen’s teeth in Rochester), where I was supposed to get the final results from all the tests I’d had to see if I had Sjogren’s Syndrome (I do). I had been waiting for that appointment for over three months.

While I was waiting for campus security to show up, I somehow managed to start my car. I waited and waited for them, but could not wait any longer. I needed to get to my mechanic to see what was wrong with the car. I couldn’t risk having it not start again.

Now understand this, my mechanic, Sam Lovetro, is terrific. He will never fix anything that isn’t broken, and he won’t charge me for finding out that nothing is wrong with my car. A great quality for a mechanic to have. He also knows me by face and name, and even knows what car I drive, since I’ve been going to him for a long time (and he got lots of money out of my effort to salvage my old Toyota Corolla). Well, I went in and begged him to fix my car in one damned hurry, if it was possible, as I needed to get to my doctor’s appointment at 2 p.m. He said he would see what he could do. When I called later, though, he said he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Well, fine. This had happened a few times before, so maybe it was just some fluke.