For those who doubt that Murphy’s Law is just a theory, I would jus say: read on. Some poor chap in Canada did something that he probably will regret for the rest of his natural life and surely will not put on his curriculum. He flipped a switch he shouldn’t and that costed 11 million dollars. Yeah, you read it right: 11 million! Oops! My bad! Apprantly the guy, who was working on installing a structural steel platform at an ethylene plant in Corunna, Ontario, mistakenly activated a process shutdown switch on this Monday afternoon thus halting the complete production and forcing two weeks of repairs at the facility. The switch – and I wonder what it looks like – was some kind of safety feature at the plant. Now, usually mistakes like this happen because of unclear instructions or wrong tags. Who knows: maybe the switch had some French text instead of English, or maybe the guy didn’t speak or read English or French. I also wonder: normally alarm buttons and such are located behind some glass (you know: “in case of emergency break glass”). Anyway: I would not be surprised is this is a case of bad “human-computer interface design”.