Anything that can go wrong will—at the worst possible moment.
Distinct from Murphy's law by the addition of timing. Murphy was about designing for the worst case; Finagle is about the worst case arriving during the demonstration.
In practice
- The projector fails during the demonstration and worked all morning.
- The one week the backup job is unmonitored is the week the disk fails, which is why the monitoring is what needs monitoring.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Risk & Reliability
- Essay
- How much caution, and the jokes about its limits