Time Management - Marc Mancini
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8<br />
The Art of<br />
Anticipating<br />
In the 1950s America was flush with possibilities. The<br />
powerful manufacturing engines of World War II had finally<br />
been retooled to peacetime needs. Ranch houses, huge<br />
cars, jet airliners, freeways, rockets, and TV had redefined<br />
the face of America. Anything seemed feasible.<br />
In the midst of all this gee-whiz optimism, a TRW engineer<br />
made a memorable and rather cynical presentation. The<br />
speaker recast a quote he had read in Aviation Mechanics<br />
Bulletin: “If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, it<br />
will be.” His new, generic version: “If anything can go<br />
wrong, it will.” That engineer’s last name was Murphy.<br />
Or so one of the stories goes. (There are at least five explanations<br />
of “Murphy’s Law.”) Not that the twentieth century<br />
was the first to note that “the best laid schemes of mice and men<br />
often go astray,” as eighteenth-century poet Robert Burns put it.<br />
But as our lives have become increasingly complicated and<br />
reliant on technology, glitches appear to be far more prevalent<br />
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