Writers beware - sod's law exists

Part of my first job on leaving Uni was in the quality assurance section of a scientific organisation.  Believe it or not, before the late 1970s little of it existed.  After all everyone was doing their best so the data and reports would be fine wouldn’t they?  Answer, no.  Because if nothing else Sod’s Law operates. i.e. whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.  And one of the problems back then was that nobody understood what could go wrong – it was of course, anything and everything.  So after a few well published cases, which I won’t go into, the need for a formal system of quality assurance was established.

For me this involved, amongst other things the checking of scientific reports, both for internal consistency and against the “raw data”.  At first my involvement, essentially pointing out where people had made errors was resented.  I mean, who was I to tell a senior scientist they had made mistakes.  And this wasn’t just the odd typo, whole lines of data were transposed, decimal points were in the wrong place, thing disappeared from the records only to appear elsewhere.  I could go on.  These didn’t always affect the scientific outcomes, but occasionally they could and this was important work.  What’s more it’s not as if you could predict when or where a major error might occur.

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