Susan Keezer: The science behind Murphy's Law
Even if physics had been offered that semester, I would have run as if my poodle skirt was ablaze had some ill-intended counselor suggested it. There are some 50 laws of physics and only one clings to my memory like a leech: Murphy’s Law. “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
I have noticed something and shared it with friends. If I were the only observer, I think I would head to a geriatric psychiatrist and throw my rickety self at her feet.
If an item of furniture rests on three-inch legs on a floor covered with hardwood, engineered hardwood (what is that?), tile, linoleum, concrete or any other non-carpeted or rug-covered surface, and it is in your house, get rid of it.
Burn it, donate it or put it on stilts.
This kind of furniture kidnaps anything that falls to the floor within two hectares of it. Or, in my case, 18 inches of it. It snatches articles to its under-bosoms with great speed and dexterity, long before you realized you’ve dropped anything.
I bring you a number of cases in point.
Some time ago I purchased two beautiful dressers. They are some 80 inches long and sit on three-inch stubby square feet. They were on sale. They bore no scratches, stains or flaws. The drawers were perfect and each dresser had two cedar drawers. They were 75% off at a good furniture store.
I should have realized that something was amiss with them.
It wasn’t until I moved that I found out they were evil at heart. Their 80-by-3-inch mouths at floor level had sucked in 11 non-matching sox, two bracelets, a box of sandwich-sized ziplock bags, a pajama top, 15 Christmas cards and a spare set of keys to my Dad’s car. The car had been sold some years before.
When I put the dressers in my new home, on hardwood floors, I gave them a stern look and muttered to myself that their days of pilfering anything that landed on the floor were past.
You would think that only rolling round objects would be food for their maws. You would be so wrong. I dropped a small rectangular perfume bottle and, before I could grab it, it was under one of those dressers within 10 seconds.
I was left standing there with its elegant cap in my hand.
The next item to disappear was a heavy-duty flashlight that requires both my hands to hold it. I was using it to look under the dresser to see how far that perfume bottle had slid when I dropped the flashlight and, as if by magic, it too went skidding under the dresser.
Other items not so costly have fled before me.
There is another part to this problem. This particular dresser is parked against a wall common to my bathroom. On the other side of this wall is my bathroom vanity. You know where this is going, don’t you? Yes. The vanity rests on three-inch legs. On a tile floor.
Pills, pill bottles, pill bottle caps, make-up containers, lip balm, lipstick, eye shadow, eyeliner, lip liner, mascara and nearly every single piece of cosmetic owned by me is round. All roll. If dropped, they can hit 60mph in less than three seconds, and I can hear them zoom under and hit the wall behind that vanity. By now, there is an entire pharmacy under there.
I used to think the malignant creature who hides behind the washer and dryer and who eats just one of a pair of socks per load of laundry was cast into our midst by some demonic god of the universe. I thought that was the only one.
Wrong. There are others who hide under dressers or bathroom vanities ready to strike and catch things you really want.
I’ve tried to re-capture all the missing items by using a broom to sweep under the dresser but they have some support thing that catches the broom and tries to keep it in addition to the other booty. The vanity cannot be lifted up or shifted due to plumbing.
Moving the guilty dresser would mean taking from its top the television, lamp, jewelry box and a stack of papers.
Is this some peculiar law of physics? That no matter what shape a fallen object is, it can easily fly at warp speed under furniture and refuse to emerge?
It is that or something goes on under there that is so attractive these items do not want to return to me.
String quartet concerts? Midnight movies? A dating service? I give up: I will match whatever it. Just come out of there. Please.
— Susan Keezer lives in Adrian. Send your good news to her at lenaweesmiles@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Susan Keezer: The science behind Murphy's Law
