A recent post on the thread about the malignant fairy [or pixie or gremlin according to other contributors] that steals one's posts and prevents their appearing, particularly when has failed to copy & paste, made the point that it never did so when one had included a really confused statement or blatant spelling error.

Ah, I thought — that's what we call Sod's Law: a sort of law of unintended consequences which means that the result of any action is always the worst-case-scenario {from Sod as abbreviation of Sodomite, originally, I think — a particularly perverse or ill-willing person: is this an American expression also?}. I almost put up a post to this effect; but then thought it was probably worth a thread of its own. I virtuously searched, both Sod's Law & its variant Murphy's Law [of which more in a moment], to see if there had been previous threads on them; & found, somewhat to my surprise, that there were none. So here goes.

A particular branch of Sod's Law is the one we call Murphy's Law, which states "If it can go wrong, it will!". And there are even various amendments to that one: such as the one I know as Barton's Amendment To Murphy's Law, which adds the proviso, "And even if it can't, it might!".

Does anyone know of any further refinements? Or has anyone any experiences to relate in which the operation of these indispensable pieces of folk wisdom are particularly well exemplified?