Schemmer’s Law (Organization & Programs): When an organization faces a 20 year threat, it responds with 15-year programs, organized with 5-year plans, managed by 3-year directors, and funded by 1-year appropriations.

Simmons’s Law: The desire for racial integration increases with the square of the distance from the actual event.

SNAFU Equations: 1) Given any problem containing N equations, there will be N+1 unknowns. 2) An object or bit of information most needed will be least available. 3) Any device requiring service or adjustment will be least accessible. 4) Interchangeable devices won’t. 5) In any human endeavor, once you have exhausted all possibilities and fail, there will be one solution, simple and obvious, highly visible to everyone else. 6) Badness comes in waves.

Thoreau’s Theories Of Adaptation: 1) After months of training and you finally understand all of a program’s commands, a revised version of the program arrives with an all-new command structure. 2) After designing a useful routine that gets around a familiar “bug” in the system, the system is revised, the “bug” taken away, and you’re left with a useless routine. 3) Efforts in improving a program’s “user friendliness” invariable lead to work in improving user’s “computer literacy”. 4) That’s not a “bug”, that’s a feature!

Thyme’s Law: Everything goes wrong at once.

Universal Technical Document Units Law: Characteristics, specifications, dimensions, and any other data included in technical documents must be stated in exotic units, such as “tenth of troy once per barn” for pressures, or “acre times atmosphere per kilogram” for speeds.

Vail’s Second Axiom: The amount of work to be done increases in proportion to the amount of work already completed.