The Difference Between Karma, Irony, and Murphy’s Law

Today I am here to use a real life example to demonstrate the elusive difference between the oft-confused karma, irony, and Murphy’s Law.  Because yesterday morning I had an unhealthy dose of all three.

To begin with, Edward (who always gets up at the crack of the middle of the night) decided to sleep in.  He never sleeps in on the weekend.  Ever.  Of course it had to be a school day that he would not wake up, and my wife just left to take Ruby to 2nd grade without waking us, because why would she?  The boy always wakes up on time.  Instead I woke up at 8:15, and his bus comes at 8:30.

Now, one might be tempted to call this irony, but this is not irony at all.  This is pure karma.  I have overslept and been morning-grumpy so many days in my life, that it just had to catch up to me eventually.  Suddenly I was faced with a small version of myself, refusing to wake up and greet the day with a smile.  Karma.  Or, “what goes around comes around.”

So then I had to rush him.  We had 15 minutes to get dressed, brush teeth, take medicine, eat breakfast, pack backpack, and get outside so that the bus would not leave without us.  And everything went wrong.  We couldn’t find his shoes.  He spilled his breakfast.  His backpack dumped out all over the floor.  It was a series of consecutive disasters that spiraled out of control until we were in full on meltdown mode, and we were late for the bus.

On the surface, this may sound like Murphy’s Law to some people, but actually this was a textbook case of actual irony.  By definition, irony is when the actions you take bring about the opposite of the intended result.  We couldn’t find his shoes because we were looking too quickly when they were really right in front of us.  Both the breakfast and the backpack spilled because we were rushing.  Every action we took to increase our speed and shorten the amount of time it would take to get ready, only served to make us later.  We would have been on time for the bus, had we not been in such a hurry.  Irony.

So now we are frazzled, disheveled, and late, and we are standing out at the bus stop, one of us in our pajamas, and it is cold.  It has been warm or chilly up until yesterday, but now it is full on, snowflakes-a-comin’, cold.  And I am wearing crocs, thin pajama pants, and a fleece with a broken zipper that is flapping open in the breeze.  And that’s it.  I am freezing, it is damp and wet, and the bus ends up being 30 minutes late.  They are supposed to call us if they are going to be more than 15 minutes late, but I didn’t have my cell phone because my pajama pants have no pockets, so I ran in to see if they had called.  They hadn’t.  So I called them instead.  The aide on the bus, who is a lovely person, does not have a full grasp of the English language, so every question I asked was answered with the reply “shortly.”

“How far away is the bus?”

“Shortly.”

“Does that mean one minute?  Five minutes?  Ten?!”

“Shortly.”

“Can you tell me what block you are on, or something that you are near?”

“Shortly.”

“Do you have more kids to pick up, or are we next?”

“Shortly.” *click*

She hung up.  Well, fine, that conversation was not productive anyway.  It was another 10-15 minutes after that call that I finally saw the bus pull around the corner and down our block.  And was this karma, for all of the times I have been late for something?  No.  This was Murphy’s Law.  Anything that can go wrong will, and at the worst possible time.  Of all the days for the bus to be 30 minutes late, it is the day that we rushed to make it on time.  It is the coldest day of the year.  And it is the coldest day of the year that I happen to be outside, practically naked for 30 minutes.  And it is wet.  And the boy is tired and grumpy.  It was like every possible combination of bad things decided to meet up and hang out in my personal space, each one creating the worst possible time for the others to happen.  And you might say that having the bus come early that day would actually have been worse.  No.  It would not have been.  I would have much preferred a ten minute drive to school than a bone-chilling, extremity-numbing half hour wait in the Vermont October morning.  Murphy’s Law.

So now you know the difference between karma, irony, and Murphy’s Law.  And I hope you also know that, if you have to experience these things in your life, it’s best not to do it all at once.