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.