N.E.E.
“Nothing’s ever easy.”
One of my father’s favorite dadisms. He had many, as most dads do, but this adage seemed to adhere to my life lessons and their application more than many others. We shortened it to N.E.E. for more poignant usage, and on many occasions it has been expanded into “Nothing’s Ever Fucking Easy.” Not as fatherly as the original, but you get the gist.
While perhaps a bit closer than kissing cousins with Murphy’s Law, there is a slight distinction between the two. Murphy seemed to enjoy being a cosmic dick, sticking his pain-in-the-ass fingers into everybodys’ pies all the time. (I’m sure his fan club is very, very small.) N.E.E. embodies the frequency with which the simplest, easiest tasks go awry when they should be completed in a matter of moments.
One of my favorite examples is changing a light bulb. A matter of seconds, am I right? Until the bulb breaks off at the base and you have to invest a more sizable chunk of effort to extract it. Hey! Let’s waste time and a potato too! Prepare yourself as well, for N.E.E. prefers to strike when time is exceptionally short.
Sitting down to finally tighten that loose door handle you’ve been planning on addressing only to find that the lock mechanism is malfunctioning and should be replaced does not really qualify as N.E.E. That falls under the jurisdiction of vorticision, and vorticision is an entirely different animal, deserving of its own exploration.
But I’ll not fall prey to it this day. I won’t! We’ll revisit this beast somewhere further down the road. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few screws I need to back out, fully expecting one of them (usually the last) to snap off with time consuming hilarity.