Designers, and Developers alike have to fight the tendency to get bitter over time.  Why?  In our industry, it’s easy to get stepped on, kicked when you’re down, and turned turned into a slave.  Furthermore, the process can easily repeat itself if you don’t choose your clients correctly.  And sometimes, even when things do seem to be going ok, Murphy’s law can kick into effect.  So if we combine Murphy’s laws with some industry ‘truisms’ we get something that looks like the following…

Standard Murphy’s Laws that apply to the marketing industry:

• Nothing is as easy as it looks.
• Everything takes longer than you think.
• Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
• If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
• If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
• Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
• Every solution breeds new problems.
• Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.

• If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
• If builders designed buildings the way most designers design, then the woodpecker would die before reaching the building.
• An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
• An application will not fail until it has passed QA.
• To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
• Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
• If an online application hasn’t broken yet, it is waiting for a critical moment before it breaks.
• The most excited and praise-worthy potential clients are the ones with the smallest budgets.
• If there is a possibility of several things going wrong the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
• A developer’s level of technical competence is inversely proportional to their design and usability skills.
• ‘Usability Engineer’ is an oxymoron.
• Friendly reminders, like friendly fire...aren’t.
• A great lead...isn’t
• Back-ups...don’t
• If you estimate a project’s cost, and then double that figure, you will still end up over budget.
• When ‘downloading’ says “99% Complete” there will be a flux in the space-time continuum and the download will inevitably fail.
• The bug that causes numerous of hours of troubleshooting will be caused by a mis-placed comma somewhere within 5000+ lines of code.
• Everyone else will always be busier than you.