Contemplating Murphy at 2AM

"If anything can go wrong, they will". This is the Murphy's Law as my friends told me a long time ago.

My boss before told me and the rest of his staff about this. He wanted us to make strategies that work, but assume that everything will go wrong. So we had to be prepared for the plan Bs and Cs and all the other letters in the alphabet. Doing this was very exhausting. You have to visualize the scenarios in your mind which means you have to lock yourself in a room and remove all distractions. I guess my habit of working at 2am is a result of this. By 2am, most people are already tired and asleep.

Thank God I don't do that anymore, but other than the 2am work hours the practice also influenced my general attitude towards problems. I have developed the habit of anticipating things that can go wrong, but more importantly I have developed the ability to suppress any useless reactions when confronted with an unexpected problem.

The friend I hang around with lately, for example, easily gets disturbed when something he planned does not go as expected. As a result, he spends a lot of time analyzing who to blame, and brooding over the situation. It takes him a long time to settle down and collect his thoughts. Sometimes it takes him days. I even believe that he keeps a grudge over these petty things. My friend is a genius, but I pity him. He stresses out so easily.

The term "damage control" is not new to me. I tried to train my mind to immediately shift to this mode when something goes wrong. I guess this is why I can still manage to smile in those situations. It is something that many people misinterpret for lack of seriousness or lack of care. Anyway, these thoughts came up precisely because of the friend I mentioned. Since we're always together, I get "affected" by his reactions. The worst part of it is that things go wrong because of me.

The past two months had been like hell for me. On my own, I would have faced all my problems calmly as I try to solve them. My friend simply made it all complicated for me, just as I complicated his life. It seems like the only solution here is that I spend time alone to sort things out before I associate or mingle with other people. I could really use the silence. Lately I don't get the isolation I needed, even at 2am.