- Conservation of files: A filing cabinet is filled every five years, no matter what size the filing cabinet or its location and purpose.
- Feline paper displacement: Whatever you are working on or reading will be the most comfortable place in the house for a kitty. Addendum: even if your “book” is a Kindle.
- Inch = mile student edition: Anything you do above and beyond to make your students’ lives easier will come back to bite you. That is why it is above and beyond and not standard.
- Store-bought raspberry lifespan: Illustrated by Sheldon comics.
- Most people are too involved in their own lives to worry about yours on a regular basis.
- The more you need sleep so you can think clearly because of a deadline, the less you will be able to sleep because you’re a stress-case.
- If you spend an entire semester with no social life and every weekend free, you will get several invitations for events overlapping on the same day near the end of that semester.
- The more time you need, the faster it goes by.
- You will lose something in the process of organizing that you would not have lost had you not tried to organize. (Currently looking for copies of the restricted data proposal that would be on top if I hadn’t filed them…)
What Universal Truths are we missing?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
October 19, 2011 at 4:11 am
Hey, that last bullet just applied to me. I was organizing my email this week and I accidentally deleted a file with a password I needed.
October 19, 2011 at 7:00 am
I hate it when that happens!
October 19, 2011 at 7:12 am
Corollary on the sleep thing: the more you need sleep because your kids aren’t letting you sleep, the more they will conspire to prevent you from sleeping. Until you are about to crack and do something drastic (like letting the toddler cry in her crib at night), at which point they will suddenly give you a few good nights of sleep.
Or is that just at my house?
October 19, 2011 at 7:18 am
Perhaps that would be: (in non-abusive households) kids can sense when you’re about to snap and can asymptote that line.
October 19, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Thanks. That is some fine imagery.
October 19, 2011 at 7:49 am
If it is on a counter or shelf and it can be knocked off, then a cat will knock it off.
October 19, 2011 at 7:54 am
YES.
October 19, 2011 at 7:57 am
When Fall rolls around, all of the children’s pants you have will either be too small or too big for your child.
October 19, 2011 at 8:51 am
And the corollary:
Immediately after stores clearance their winter clothes, your child will outgrow every pair of pants she owns, which leaves you trying to piece together some sort of outfit that will keep her warm enough during the remaining 3 months of winter.
October 19, 2011 at 3:03 pm
And the SoCal corollary- your child’s swimsuit will seem just fine until after the stores all take their swimsuits off the racks. And then it will disintegrate.
October 19, 2011 at 9:14 am
Also, if you stash something for your child to wear when ze grows into it, by the time you remember it’s there it will be too small.
October 19, 2011 at 4:23 pm
All too true!
October 19, 2011 at 9:35 am
Store-bought raspberry lifespan is so true.
That’s why I always eat mine in the car on the way home, at 2am.
“If it is on a counter or shelf and it can be knocked off, then a cat will knock it off.”
Also applies to toddlers. Even if said shelf or counter is so high toddler “couldn’t possibly” get to it. Possibly my toddler has secret cat genes. We won’t talk about the genetic experiments I was doing in the lab when zie was created. I mean conceived. Yes. Conceived…
October 19, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Hahaha. Yes.
October 19, 2011 at 10:26 am
Re: “You will lose something in the process of organizing…” and Re: the last post. Could the restricted data proposal be multitasking as a bookmark?
October 19, 2011 at 11:01 am
Hahaha. It actually ended up being filed in the wrong folder.
October 19, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Especially if your book is a kindle (or other electronic device); they emit warmth!
Corollary: You will find something useful in the process of organizing that you had forgotten you possessed and then lost.
October 19, 2011 at 4:24 pm
An upside!
October 19, 2011 at 5:44 pm
No doy!
October 21, 2011 at 11:25 am
All, all true.
September 5, 2016 at 1:28 am
[…] wouldn’t have spent more than a thousand dollars on cosmetic damage on my car, and instead of getting a second filing cabinet, we would have either culled, scanned, and shredded or we would have stuck some bankers boxes in […]