Just when you thought Murphy's Law was bad enough

by Chris Cowan

Everyone's heard about Murphy's law, "If it can go wrong it will", but not so many have heard of  Parkinson's Law.  Parkinson's Law isn't "Never host a chat show where the guest list includes a man with a fake flightless bird attached to his arm" or even "As a minister of the realm, if you're going to shag your secretary, make sure you wear a condom.", although both of these are recommended.  Parkinson's law was developed for socio-economic purposes but can be applied to many aspects of daily life.  Not least as an afterword to Murphy's Law.

Parkinson's Law was first stated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson (British Political Scientist) in the London Economist in 1955.  It states "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.".  It can be quite quickly generalised to something of the form "A structure will tend to expand to fill the resources devoted to it.", This is of course open to quite a wide interpretation and at times a politically useful misinterpretation.  Parkinson's Law is often used as an excuse by politicians for cutbacks to common resources. For example "If we spend more money on the Health service, it will expand to consume the extra resources." Translated this means if we build more hospitals more people will become ill.  It doesn't take long to figure out that this is nonsense and Parkinson's Law needs to be applied with a little more care, unless of course you're a politician in desperate need of an excuse for sacking 300 nurses.

Parkinson's Law can be applied to more accurate effect, for example pavements.  How often have you been stuck behind an old age pensioner with four large bags of shopping as you're in a desperate hurry to get to the post office before it closes. For a wider pavement, you suddenly find yourself behind a group of kids chatting whilst dawdling along at the pace of a sloth who has decided to go on a mellow Sunday stroll along one of his favourite branches. Parkinson's Law in action.  Whole industries are based on Parkinson's Law as, I'm sure, anyone who has recently bought yet more blank video tapes or upgraded their hard-drive will surely testify.

It isn't all bad news though, as Parkinson's Law can be used as evidence for positive change.  In the case of traffic jams as well as telling you that the number of cars on the road will expand as you make more roads, it also says that if you put money into public transport then more people will use it. Consider for example the very popular Manchester Metrolink.

As the title may suggest Parkinson's Law can also be applied to Murphy's Law, so as well as,

"If things can go wrong they will go wrong"

Parkinson's Law gives,

"When things go wrong they'll go wrong in the worst possible way."

This is always worth bearing in mind in certain situations, for example, "Oh no, I've accidentally deleted some files I wonder if they'll be important." or "Oops I've dropped this cardboard box whilst in the process of moving, I hope it doesn't contain anything fragile."

I find it comforting that such incidents don't just happen to me but are just aspects of Parkinson's law.