Jokes and Puns: Lighten up your day!

Peter's Paradox: Employees in a hierarchy do not really object to incompetence in their colleagues.

Peter's Observation: Super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Peter's Law of Substitution: Look after the molehills and the mountains will look after themselves.

Peter's Law of Evolution: Competence always contains the seed of incompetence.

Peter's Inversion: Internal consistency is valued more highly than efficiency.

Peter's Hidden Postulate According to Godin: Every employee begins at his level of competence.

Peter Principle: In every hierarchy, whether it be government or business, each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; every post tends to be filled by an employee incompetent to execute its duties. Corollaries:
Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place.
Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
If at first you don't succeed, try something else.

Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.

Persig's Postulate: The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

Perlsweig's Law: People who can least afford to pay rent, pay rent. People who can most afford to pay rent, build up equity.

Perkin's postulate: The bigger they are, the harder they hit.

Perelman's Point: There is nothing like a good painstaking survey full of decimal points and guarded generalizations to put a glaze like a Sung vase on your eyeball.

Captain Penny's Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool MOM.

Peers's Law: The solution to a problem changes the problem.

Peckham's Law (Beckhap's Law?): Beauty times brains equals a constant.

Peck's Programming Postulates (Philosophic Engineering applied to programming):

In any program, any error which can creep in will eventually do so.
Not until the program has been in production for at least six months will the most harmful error be discovered.
Any constants, limits, or timing formulas that appear in the computer manufacturer's literature should be treated as variables.
The most vital parameter in any subroutine stands the greatest chance of being left out of the calling sequence.
If only one compiler can be secured for a piece of hardware, the compilation times will be exorbitant.
If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction.
Job control cards that positively cannot be arranged in improper order, will be.
Interchangeable tapes won't.
If more than one person has programmed a malfunctioning routine, no one is at fault.
If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input, an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it.
Duplicated object decks which test in identical fashion will not give identical results at remote sites.
Manufacturer's hardware and software support ceases with payment for the computer.

Paulg's Law: In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save.

Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.

Paul Principle: People become progressively less competent for jobs they once were well equipped to handle.

Paturi Principle: Success is the result of behavior that completely contradicts the usual expectations about the behavior of a successful person.
Corollary: The amount of success is in inverse proportion to the effort involved in attaining it.

Patton's Law: A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

Patricks's Theorem: If the experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment.

Pastore's Truths:
Even paranoids have enemies.
This job is marginally better than daytime TV.
On alcohol: four is one more than more than enough.

Dolly Parton's Principle: The bigger they are, the harder it is to see your shoes.

Parson's Laws:
If you break a cup or plate, it will not be the one that was already chipped or cracked.
A place you want to get to is always just off the edge of the map you happen to have handy.
A meeting lasts at least 1 1/2 hours however short the agenda.

Mrs. Parkinson's Law: Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind.

Parkinson's Principle of Non-Origination: It is the essence of grantsmanship to persuade the Foundation executives that it was THEY who suggested the research project and that you were a belated convert, agreeing reluctantly to all they had proposed.

Parkinson's Law of 1000: An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.

Parkinson's Law of the Telephone: The effectiveness of a telephone conversation is in inverse proportion to the time spent on it.

Parkinson's Law of Medical Research: Successful research attracts the bigger grant which makes further research impossible.

Parkinson's Law of Delay: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

Parkinson's Sixth Law: The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published.

Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.

Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.

Parkinson's Third Law: Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.

Parkinson's Second Law: Expenditures rise to meet income.

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its completion.

Parkinson's Axioms:
An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
Officials make work for each other.

Parkin's Law of Irritation: Anything that happens enough times to irritate you will happen at least once more.

Parker's Third Rule of Tech Support: If you can't navigate a one-level, five-item phone tree, you didn't need a computer anyway.

Parker's Law of Political Statements: The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility, and vice versa.

Parker's Rule of Parliamentary Procedure: A motion to adjourn is always in order.

Pareto's Law (The 20/80 Law): 20% of the customers account for 80% of the turnover, 20% of the components account for 80% of the cost, and so forth.

Pardo's Postulates:
Anything good is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
The three faithful things in life are money, a dog, and an old woman.
Don't care if you're rich or not, as long as you live comfortably and can have everything you want.

Paradox of Selective Equality: All things being equal, all things are never equal.

Paperboy's rule of Weather: No matter how clear the skies are, a thunderstorm will move in 5 minutes after the papers are delivered.

Panic Instruction: When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried.

Ozian Option: I can't give you brains, but I can give you a diploma.

Otten's Law of Typesetting: Typesetters always correct intentional errors, but fail to correct unintentional ones.

Otten's Law of Testimony: When a person says that, in the interest of saving time, he will summarize his prepared statement, he will talk only three times as long as if he had read the statement in the first place.

Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't.

Orwell's Law of Bridge: All bridge hands are equally likely, but some are more equally likely than others.

Orion's Law: Everything breaks down.

Ordering Principle: Those supplies necessary for yesterday's experiment must be ordered no later than tomorrow noon.

Optimum Optimorum Principle: There comes a time when one must stop suggesting and evaluating new solutions, and get on with the job of analyzing and finally implementing one pretty good solution.

Oppenheimer's Observation: The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

Olum's Observation (and see Martha's Maxim and Farrow's Finding): If God had intended us to go around naked, He would have made us that way.

Old Children's Law: If it tastes good, you can't have it. If it tastes awful, you'd better clean your plate.

Old and Kahn's Law: The efficiency of a committee meeting is inversely proportional to the number of participants and the time spent on deliberations.

Oesner's Law (Oeser's Law?): There is a tendency for the person in the most powerful position in an organization to spend all his time serving on committees and signing letters.

Occam's Razor: Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity. Reformulations:
The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be correct.
Whenever two hypotheses cover the facts, use the simpler of the two.
Cut the crap.

Occam's Electric Razor: The most difficult light bulb to replace burns out first and most frequently.

The Obvious Law: Actually, it only SEEMS as though you mustn't be deceived by appearances.

O'Brien's Rule: Nothing is ever done for the right reason.

O'Brien's Principle (The $357.73 Theorem): Auditors always reject any expense account with a bottom line divisible by five or ten.

O'Brien's First Law of Politics: The more campaigning, the better.

Oaks's Unruly Laws for Lawmakers:
Law expands in proportion to the resources available for its enforcement.
Bad law is more likely to be supplemented than repealed.
Social legislation cannot repeal physical laws.

Nyquist's Theory of Equilibrium: Equality is not when a female Einstein gets promoted to assistant professor; equality is when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a male schlemiel.

Nursing Mother Principle: Do not nurse a kid who wears braces.

No. 3 Pencil Principle: Make it sufficiently difficult for people to do something, and most people will stop doing it.
Corollary: If no one uses something, it isn't needed.

North Carolina Equine Paradox: Vyarzerzomanimororsezassezanzerareorses?

Noble's Law of Political Imagery: All other things being equal, a bald man cannot be elected President of the United States.
Corollary: Given a choice between two bald political candidates, the American people will vote for the less bald of the two.

Nobel Effect: There is no proposition, no matter how foolish, for which a dozen Nobel signatures cannot be collected. Furthermore, any such petition is guaranteed page-one treatment in the New York Times.

Nixon's Rule: If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

Ninety-ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.

Nies's Law: The effort expended by the bureaucracy in defending any error is in direct proportion to the size of the error.

Nienberg's Law: Progress is made on alternate Fridays.

Nick the Greek's Law: All things considered, life is 9-to-5 against.

Newton's Little-known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.

Newman's Law: Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of social intercourse.