Jeff's Law of Technology

[[Back to Jeff's Page]]

"Any complex system will tend to non-deterministically fail in inverse proportion to the level of the observers' understanding of the system's operation."
Whew! A mouthful. It's sort of the basic quantum nature of the universe wrapped up with Murphy's Law. It really crops up when you put complex computer systems in front of novice users. It's best explained by example.
Anyone who has tried to help someone use a computer has probably had an experience like this:

"It's not working!!"

"Just press the X key."
"I did." click. click. click. "It just won't work!"

"Here, let me see..." click. "See it works just fine."
"Hey!! I just did that. Why didn't it work for me?"

Well now you know... Basically the novice just doesn't have enough information to collapse all of those stray (and impossible) quantum states into a correctly functioning system...