Murphy's Nurses - Murphy's Law as applied to Nursing. By Nurses.

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Murphy's Laws, as seen by Nurses - "If something can go wrong, it will"

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	Your buddies who were reading the paper at the nurses' desk a minute ago always disappear when you need help ...
	Expect to get your pay raise the same day the hospital raises the parking rates (and other charges)
	The better job you do, the more work you can expect to be handed ...
	The amount of clean linen available is inversely proportional to your immediate needs.
	The more confused and impulsive a patient is, the less chance there is for a family member or friend to sit with the patient.
	The perfect nurse for the job will apply the day after that post is filled by some semiqualified idiot. Corollary: You hear about the perfect job the day after you accept another one.
	If only one solution can be found for a problem, then it is usually a stupid solution.
	Despite an apartment littered with clothes, the dog will always sleep on the one clean uniform that you had laid out the night before.
	When the nurse on the preceeding shift has surrounded the patient with absorbant pads, the code brown will hit every sheet and miss every pad.
	Rest assured that when you are in a hurry, the nurse's notes have not been written.
	When you are starting an IV on an uncooperative patient, or dealing with a huge code brown, there is a phone call for you and it's that crabby physician that you have been paging all morning.
	Fire drills always occur on your day from hell - or at the end of a 12 hour shift when you have an important date.
	The first person in line when the clinic opens will not require urgent care. The sickest person will arrive 5 minutes before closing: "I thought I'd feel better"

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Definition and Origins

The following article was excerpted from The Desert Wings, March 3, 1978,
by the AFFTC History Office

Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will") was born here (Edwards Air Force Base) – in 1949 at North Base. It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash.

One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it." The contractor's project manager kept a list of "laws" and added this one, which he called Murphy's Law. What he actually did was to take an old law that had been around for years in a more basic form (see above) and give it a name.

From: http://www.edwards.af.mil/history/docs_html/tidbits/murphy's_law.html

25 June 2008 |

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