How to plug in to the future with full assurance that what can go wrong . . . won’t

Dixon Gayer, my Cal State Long Beach correspondent, has encountered what he considers a correlative to Murphy’s Law.

Everyone knows Murphy’s Law: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

Gayer’s correlative, paraphrased, is that everything that goes wrong will automatically correct itself when you take it to a repair shop.

I’m sure we have all had the experience of hearing a knock in our engine, only to have it purr like a kitten when we take it to the garage.

“Two weeks ago,” Gayer writes, “I took my Selectric I to the typewriter repair shop because of a balky return key. When the repairman tried to make the key malfunction, it refused; it worked perfectly.

“As he continued trying to get the machine to malfunction, a woman brought in a typewriter complaining that the p, j and q were all printing below the line. Another repair person tested the machine; it worked perfectly on its p’s and q’s (and j’s too). Both clerks called our attention to a huge wall chart stating Murphy’s Law.

“Having delivered faulty automobiles, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, video recorders and dozens of other items to repair shops, only to have them hum and purr for the service person, I have expanded upon Murphy’s Law with Gayer’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, except at the repair shop where it will magically, mysteriously (and temporarily) repair itself. (Once outside the repair shop again, see Murphy’s Law. . . .)”

I had an experience with Gayer’s corollary just last weekend. Suddenly, after performing beautifully for months, my computer refused to send my column into The Times, by telephone.

I have grown so dependent on this daily miracle that when the system breaks down, as it did once before, a cold sweat appears on my forehead. I feel as if I have been retrogressed to the 1960s.

I had been irritated anyway because my wife had come into my workroom and removed the little library table that stands to the right of my chair, on which I keep the books and papers from which I am working. She needed it for the electric typewriter she had brought home from her office to do her homework on.

I feared that it was a glitch in either my software or my hardware. That is the option anyone has when a computer goes haywire, but no matter whether it’s the one or the other, you can’t do anything about it. You have to take it in.

I had a feeling that if I took it in, it would work all right.

I phoned the shop where I had bought it. The man who might help me was busy, I was told, but he would call me back. He never called me back.

Finally I telephoned my son, who is something of a computer wizard, and asked him if he could think of anything.

He came over. I turned the computer on and he checked the connections, disconnecting and reconnecting all the plugs.

“Try it now,” he said.

It worked fine.

We figured out that my wife must have loosened one of the plugs when she took the table. So we knew what was wrong and whose fault it was.

But Gayer is right. I have had the television man come up to fix the television, and all he did was turn it on and it worked fine.

The other day a department store telephoned to advise me that the guarantee was about to run out on our new television set, and they wondered if we’d like to take out an insurance policy to cover anything that might go wrong.

“Do you expect something to go wrong?” I asked him.

“Well, you never can tell,” he said. “It’s for your protection.”

It wasn’t long ago that I received the same kind of call about our new refrigerator. Recently when my wife bought her new car she paid $400 for an insurance policy that ran three years beyond the guarantee.

What is this? Don’t they have any faith in their products anymore? Or are they getting into the insurance business?

I had a feeling that if I took the policies, my TV and my refrigerator would run fine until the policies expired, and then the firms would hit on me to renew them. Though I am pessimistic about the life expectancy of any product you buy today, I resent it when the retailer who sells me a TV or a refrigerator tries to make a few bucks more by selling me an insurance policy to cover its breakdown. It seems to me like paying blackmail to insure that a machine I bought in good faith will continue to perform.

On the other hand, I believe in having my house and my car heavily insured, and I have been thinking of buying earthquake insurance. For one thing, scientists are convinced that the Big One can’t be too far off. They are cyclic, the big ones, and we are about due for one the size of the one that devastated San Francisco in 1906.

It would be gratifying, I suppose, to have earthquake insurance and to be able to rebuild while all about you were wiped out. But that isn’t my real reason for buying earthquake insurance. It’s that I have a feeling that if I do buy insurance, there won’t be any earthquake.

It’s a corollary to Gayer’s Law: Whatever you buy a policy against won’t happen.

Obviously, that’s what the insurance companies are counting on.