A compendium of laws, axioms, principles and other scientific‑sounding nonsense explaining how humans actually behave
As promised, the research continues.
The observations that follow provide further evidence that human behaviour is governed by a remarkably consistent set of rules, many of which appear to have been specifically designed to make everyone's lives more difficult.
At this point, the pattern is becoming difficult to dismiss.
Not that anyone has tried.
6. The Tech Failure Lemma
During any video meeting, participants will assume the technology is malfunctioning until proven otherwise.
This is why every screen-share begins with the ritualistic incantation: "Can everyone see my screen?"
Years of frozen video, black screens, and audio delays that make every speaker look like they're starring in a Bruce Lee movie have conditioned us to believe that a flawless video conferencing experience is the exception rather than the rule.
Does anyone enter an elevator and ask the other riders if the buttons work?
Do pilots come on the intercom mid-flight and ask the passengers to verify that the wings are still visible out their windows?
They do not.
Because, fortunately, most technology benefits from the presumption of a successful outcome.
Yet every Zoom or Teams meeting begins with a group confirmation that the screen-sharing software is doing the one thing its name promises.
This ritual serves no practical purpose. If the screen share has failed, someone will interrupt almost immediately to let us know.
Assuming, of course, that their microphone works.
Classification: Lemma
A subsidiary proposition used to support the proof of a larger statement.
7. The Law of the Insufficient Lunch
No matter how substantial your lunch was, there is always room for leftover board‑meeting sandwiches.
The human stomach possesses a special compartment reserved exclusively for free food.
This compartment remains inaccessible during ordinary meals but activates immediately upon receiving an email containing the words "leftover sandwiches in the break room."
This is because the quality of the food is also subject to an immutable inverse relationship: the less likely you were to be invited to the meeting, the better the catering appears to have been.
Board‑meeting leftovers invariably come from a bistro and consist of artisanal sandwiches constructed from ingredients that would send most of us scurrying off in search of a dictionary.
By contrast, meetings you actually attend never occur over the lunch hour. On the rare occasion that they do, lunch consists of a soggy, six‑inch meatball sub cut into twelve equal portions and distributed only after presenting the appropriate corporation-issued ration card for office peons.
Classification: Law
A statement describing an invariable relation among phenomena under given conditions.
8. The Tech‑Proximity Support Principle
The instant you graduate with a degree or diploma in any computer-adjacent discipline, everyone in your personal orbit will designate you their permanent technical support representative for any device with a microchip.
Your specialization does not matter.
Your profession does not matter.
Your actual job description does not matter.
Somewhere, a certificate awarded by a post-secondary educational institution exists with two things on it: your full name, and the word computer.
Therefore, you know computers.
All of them.
Doesn’t matter if it’s ENIAC or a modern supercomputer. If it’s got a vacuum tube or a microchip in it, you’re the guy.
Which means that when your mother's iPad slows down, the support ticket is automatically assigned to you.
Which means that most of your conversation will not be about the technology at all:
"I'm trying to write an email, but all I see is the spinny wheel thing."
"Okay. You probably have too many apps open."
"Apps?"
"Have you been using anything else on the iPad?"
"No."
"Nothing?"
"Well, Cribbage. And Solitaire. And the weather. And I was looking at stuff on The Shopping Channel website. And I watched three Adam Rose videos. He’s so funny!"
"Did you close those apps?"
"Yes, I stopped using them."
"That's not what I asked. I'm asking if you closed them."
"Closed what?"
"The apps you were using. Solitaire, cribbage, Adam what's-his-face, those apps. Did you close them?"
"How can they still be open? I can't see them on my screen."
Yeah. I'm a little shocked I have any hair left on my head at all.
The designated tech expert quickly discovers that the actual technical knowledge required is surprisingly small. Most of the job consists of determining:
What device the caller is holding.
Which button they're looking at.
Whether the thing they're calling "the little square" is an icon, an app, a browser tab, a notification, a menu, a document, or an advertisement.
Eventually, after several hours of investigation, the original issue is revealed to be neither memory usage nor software failure.
In this particular case, Mail was struggling under the strain of 10,000 unfinished draft emails.
To which Mom says, with just a breath of affrontage: “Well I certainly didn’t put them there!”
The principle remains undefeated.
People do not ask for technical assistance because you're uniquely qualified to solve the problem.
They ask because once you become "the computer person," every future technology problem becomes your problem by administrative assignment.
Despite mounting evidence that a degree in behavioural psychology would be far more useful.
Classification: Principle
A fundamental doctrine or assumption forming the basis of behaviour.
9. The Urgency Nonequivalence Hypothesis
The perceived urgency to fix a problem is inversely proportional to the complainant's responsibility for solving it.
When someone foists a problem onto you, insisting it requires your immediate attention, the urgency associated with that problem is at its maximum.
However, if you point out that the issue is actually theirs to fix, the urgency plummets like a fat kid on a vacated teeter-totter.
What’s more striking is how quickly the urgency collapses once it’s no longer your problem to deal with.
Problems routinely move from:
"The sky is falling and you need to fix this or we're all going to die!"
to
"I'll look at this sometime next never."
in about the same amount of time required to volley responsibility back over the net to them.
When responsibility is travelling in your direction, problems are described as business-impacting, customer-affecting, or civilization-razing.
When responsibility begins travelling in the opposite direction, the same issue frequently enters a period of remarkable stability. It can be managed. Follow-up discussions become less frequent and less imperative. The apocalypse is postponed.
This suggests that urgency is not a fixed property of a problem but a variable determined by the complainant's proximity to responsibility.
Classification: Hypothesis
A tentative explanation proposed for testing against observable facts.
10. The Respiratory Arrest Test for Problem Prioritization
All problems can be more accurately prioritized by determining whether the requester will stop breathing if the problem isn't dealt with immediately.
This universal truth applies across industries, departments, and personality types. It is the single most reliable method for distinguishing genuine emergencies from performative ones.
I’ve used this one lots of times.
When everyone classifies their problem as priority one, it becomes difficult to establish which is the true priority to work on. And sometimes — let’s face it — it’s none of them.
This came up when a third “life-threatening” emergency was set ablaze and casually lobbed into my office.
Once this latest calamity-in-waiting was described to me, I remember thinking: “This person truly believes that this is a legitimate catastrophe, mere seconds away from triggering corporate collapse.”
Then, viewing myself as the office Socrates, I remember thinking: “This is an office, not an emergency room. Clearly, this person could benefit from some perspective in the form of my vast wisdom.”
So I asked, with a straight face: “Will you stop breathing if I can’t get this done for you until tomorrow?”
It was a frank comment, perhaps a little disarming.
And in all honesty, my remark was less “wisdom” and more “wise ass.”
Anyway, after a beat or two, once they had processed what I'd just asked, they smiled and said, “No, I won’t.”
But the question also helped steer the conversation toward a more realistic assessment of the request's urgency. Sometimes when someone “needs” to have something done, that “need” is artificial compared with what’s actually important.
After extensive testing, researchers have determined that most office emergencies can survive overnight without loss of life. The world will continue to spin, and life will go on, even when artificial deadlines are missed.
Classification: Universal Truth
A statement considered valid across all contexts, circumstances, and populations.
Q.E.D.
And so, after considerable observation, analysis, speculation, and absolutely no peer review whatsoever, the theory is complete.
What began as a collection of mildly irritating observations has revealed a remarkably consistent truth: human beings are predictable.
Not rational, necessarily.
Just predictable.
We forget what we need, remember what we don't, ignore warnings until they become problems, treat technology as both miracle and scapegoat, and routinely elevate minor inconveniences to the level of natural disasters.
Yet perhaps there is some comfort in that.
If pointless human behaviour is governed by predictable rules, then at least we can learn to recognize it when it happens.
And when someone tells you their problem absolutely cannot wait until tomorrow, there is now a remarkably reliable way to determine whether they're right.
Ask whether they'll stop breathing.
If the answer is no, congratulations. You've just completed the closest thing this theory has to peer review.
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