Kilgore's Law

Y'know, I just HAVE to put this Out There.

I have a colleague at work who is a really cool guy. Real sharp; diligent, thorough experimentalist, knows a TON of stuff, gets stuff done. I don't exactly remember when or how this came up, which is extremely unfortunate from a story-telling standpoint, so I'll just have to cut this short and get to the point... sort of. For brevity I'll refer to the hero of our story as "The Hero of Our Story", or THOS for short.

No doubt in the midst of solving some ultra-urgent-end-of-universe-we're-all-gonna-die crisis (translation: normal customer request), THOS ran an experiment that produced the desired result. Just what was expected, just the right result to solve the Customer's problem. Being a conscientious, upstanding, respectable engineer, THOS did what any such stalwart member of the technical community would do and repeated the test to make sure it was reproducible.

Oooooo.... BIG mistake. Of course he didn't get the same result. In fact, the result completely contradicted the first result. Totally contrary to expectation, a looming disaster if the Customer actually got the same result. Of course he had no time to come up with another solution. Of course some management dork (probably me, come to think of it) said "Ship it!" and off the solution went, much to the horror of THOS.

Of course it worked. Of course the Customer was happy. And of course everyone lived happily ever after... well, not actually, but at least that particular problem was off the table. The point is that THOS discovered what we came to call "Kilgore's Law", much to the amusement of THOS. This has become part of the lexicon at my company, and it gets used a LOT, in a somewhat disturbing variety of situations. There's so many potential applications for this that I'll leave it "as an exercise for the reader" to think up potential uses. Feel free to post 'em.

So here it is, in all its simple Power and Beauty:

Kilgore's Law:

Never repeat a successful experiment.


For the editor's of Bartlett's Famous Quotations, a complete attribution is available upon request and presentation of suitably convincing identification.