It’s one of those days. You know the ones. One of those days where you lurch out of bed to find that the hot water’s gone out, so you grit your teeth through a cold shower and take your coffee dry. Traffic is snarled and it’s that time of year where your phone rings off the hook with robots telling you to vote for the conservative alderman on your city council ballot.

It’s one of those days where you excuse yourself to the restroom at work, lock the door, and cherish one of those little airline bottles of Jim Beam that you save for emergencies. You haven’t even gone to the Verizon store yet. You look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “Why so angry?” between nips on that tiny little bottle.

Fortunately for you, my friend, smart, observant people have been wondering about that for years. Of course we’ve all heard of Murphy’s Law, but the pudding is murkier than that. Here’s a few rules of thumb for why you’re always angry.

• Peter Principle – Employees tend to be promoted to the limit of their incompetence. It stands to reason that when a person performs well at work, they are promoted. When a person performs poorly at work, they are not promoted. This is a kind of conveyor belt to mediocrity. It funnels workers past the jobs at which they excel and deposits them at a job in which they don’t excel. And it happens everywhere, all the time. Ever wonder why you’ve never had a pleasant experience at the Verizon store?
• Claasen’s Law – Usefulness = log(Technology). In 1969 NASA either put a man on the moon or staged the most influential hoax since those jolly pranksters pulled Jesus of a cave. Either way, they did it with the processing power available on a $3 pocket calculator. Now we all walk around with powerful computers in our pockets and mostly what we’ve got to show for it is an expansive character set of emojis.
• Parkinson’s Law – The time required to complete a task will tend to fill the time allocated for that task. I got a call from a supervisor at work once. He said, “how’s that [project] coming?” I swallowed hard and replied, “IS IT DUE!?” This triggered a semi-pedantic conversation/lecture about the nuances of Parkinson’s Law which, in retrospect, is not one that I recommend having with your boss.
• Hofstadter’s Law – It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. In conjunction with Parkinson’s Law, Hofstadter’s Law seems to cause a lot of stress.
• This being an election year, there are a number of eponymous laws that seem particularly relevant. Of course if you notice a trend, it’s probably a product of confirmation bias.
  • Benford’s Law – Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
  • Cunningham’s Law – There are those who give and those who take. You can tell [them apart] by what they write.
  • Dunning-Kruger Effect – “a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority,” as well as it’s corollary that, “highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.”
  • Reilly’s Law of Retail Gravitation – People generally patronize the largest mall in the area.
  • Shirky Principle – Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.
• Wiio’s Law – Communication usually fails, except by accident.
• Hanlon’s Razor – Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. The silver lining in all of this is to remember that the world is probably not out to get you, specifically.

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