Daily Reckless : Dr Farquar-Smith

This week - Murphy's Law

If Murphy's Law were true whenever you tried to take a breath wouldn't all the air be on the other side of the room? (Contributed by Heather Coon)

Dr Farquar says: Well spotted! So were you when you had measles. Murphy’s law is the Irish associated anomaly or notion that what ever you try and achieve the opposite happens as a dysfunction with a kind of ‘cause and effect irony’. Here are some common examples of “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” and strategies to deal with them:

“You will always find something in the last place you look.”

Get carpet tape and tape everything hard to your desk or work surface. Nothing will move of its own accord kinetically. Even tape the reel of tape to the desk. I never leave good-looking pharmacists unattended. I don’t want to lose Jenny ‘Juggs’ Juniper from the dispensary. Most days I actually rope her to a chair so as not to misplace her when experimenting with different types of Bosun knots while dressed as a Girl Guide.

“No matter how long or how hard you shop for an item, after you've bought it, it will be on sale somewhere cheaper.”

Only shop at stores with security guards on duty. It may cost you twenty pounds to get these officers drunk on their lunch break but you can save many times that when they are dismissed in the afternoon for being ‘drunk in charge of a silly face’ leaving the store a shoplifters paradise.

“The other line always moves faster.”

‘Express’ checkouts or ‘10 or less’ basket queues at checkouts are a misnomer if you really expect to get home before hell freezes over.. If you have ten baskets at a queue that means ten more separate transactions for what amounts to be the same as a ‘trolley-full’ which is only one transaction for the same amount of items.

Lets reason on this: If you don’t get some dithering old Doris who has to pour her scanty cart-wheeling change on the counter for some blue cheese and a scratch card while she slips into a coma when told how much the measly items cost because she doesn’t realise the war's over?? ………………what happens???……………………..You get some fat family from the planet Fuckin’ Fat in front of you wobbling around like the International butter mountain in a heat-wave. These munching monsters who shop for enough to feed China for the next five hundreds years seem to have a myriad of Tesco vouchers to wall paper the car-park with. Drooling blimps that trail their waddling trolls for children minesweeping up and down the junk food fixtures and have wait for it….. already….. opened crisps and eaten food from shelves before it hits the conveyor. Why is that? Do they fill up their white transits with diesel and ‘do a lap of honour’ at the petrol station before they pay for it? When they go to Size Up or Mr Big do they try on clothes and walk around the store until the new attire is as sweaty as a vulture's crutch before they pay for them? Do they go to the pub and drink fifteen pints and eat the entire card of pork scratchings before they offer to pay? Then what happens? After salivating over the whole queue they discover they can’t get their fat fucking hands on their fat fucking wallet without pulling a fat fucking face because their jeans only fit a fat fuckin’ pachyderm and so they have to lie down on their fat fuckin’ arse on the fat fuckin’ floor to get the fat fucker out of their pocket because they can’t fuckin’ move for having fifty pairs of fat fucking tits growing on each fat fucking thigh where their fat fucking pockets should be. Some patients call me sexist but at least I’m not ‘Fatist’. People weighing more than me are always in my experience fatist. At least when I go for a pee I don’t need a mirror on a stick and can still see the little soldier while I aim the ‘golden braid’ .. If it’s not too cloudy already that is.

If you want to have the whole checkout to yourself do this.

Go to an amusement arcade first and change a fifty pound note for 1p 2p and 5p into loose change. Get to Tesco with your full pockets of ‘shrapnel’. Go and shop for goods. Approach your shopping checkout and arrange it on the conveyor into small groups of items and use every one those ‘bar markers’ to make it appear that you have bought for other people on several separate transactions. Take your trilby off. If you are a women use your frock by clutching the hem and making a sort of handy bag. Start to empty the huge amount of small change into your hat or frocky thingy from each pocket and begin to speak Lithuanian while acting confused and tearful. Other shoppers will think that you are new to this country and help you count all your money over the coming hours so you can produce the correct amount.

On the other hand they might just ask what ‘Fuck off’ is in your native tongue.

Just my luck. My wife always likes to turn the light off during sex. Can you help me or is it just a shot in the dark? (Fooge)

Dr F: Get a friend to hold a torch but be careful in poor light. Watch your wife doesn’t have to blink too hard. I knew an usherette once that sat on her rubber torch and lit up the whole circle.

I think your ethics are appalling and your medical advice as much use as a fart in a blizzard. (Mrs Shipman)

Dr F: Biting wind with biting remarks, eh, Mrs Shipman? Your blood test came back as ‘Blue baby Jesus Resus to be Cheerful African Green Spank the Monkey Negative Part two.’ Only two people have this rare blood group and I’m the only other one with the same colour eyes and moustache. You may also be aware that you have had heavy blood loss after having a runner bean bamboo cane enter your ‘purple star’ and snap off at your hip after a parachuting accident into my next door neighbours garden. But guess what? Oh dear! It seems all my own jolly old blood seems to be in constant use. Besides, I used my last consent form to line the breadbin with………… It also looks like more bad wind and it still might snow.

Is Blue Tac Smurf pooh? (Fooge)

Dr F: No. Its what I use when servicemen find they have some discharge or other given to them from their higher ranking officers. I roll up the rubbery adhesive into very small little plugs and stick them where it counts. When the officers can see their own privates detailed properly I tend to mount them up against a wall so they can hold onto something..