Uncle’s law
If I have a 50% chance of getting something right by accident that I would not have otherwise known about, there is a 99% chance that I will get it wrong.
Two examples from this weekend:
1 – I was changing out a door knob. Our new door knobs are the handle kind and not the knob kind. It just didn’t occur to me that the handles only matched the mount one way. So, I installed the mount upside down.
2 – I’m pretty handy with woodworking. While building Junior a chalkboard, I was going to put some trim on it. But I’d never done any trim before. I didn’t realize that one side of the trim was fatter than the other side. So, I cut two pieces to mate together and the mated perfectly, other than the fact I mated the fat side with the skinny side.
In both cases, I didn’t know either would be an issue. In both cases, I had a 50% chance of getting it right through no fault of my own. But I didn’t.
November 27th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
It only seems as if you’re wrong in all of these cases… because if you hadn’t been wrong, you wouldn’t know it.
If you had installed the door handle properly, you still wouldn’t know that it was possible to do so incorrectly, so you wouldn’t count that as something you had a 50% chance of screwing up, and didn’t.
November 27th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
I knew there was a flaw in my logic.
November 27th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Plus, two failures at 50% don’t come close to establishing a 99% chance of failure for you personally.
The raw odds of failing twice like that are, after all, 25%.