IT Accountability: Avoiding Murphy

Amongst technology experts, Murphy is someone we all try to avoid.  Murphy's Law states "Anything that can go wrong, will".  Every IT person has met Murphy, regardless of how hard they try to not meet him.  We try to avoid Murphy through many methods, some work and some don't.  Recently I've been doing a lot of research on a certain type of historical events that should give all IT professionals some tools to potentially reduce their chances of running into the problematic Mr. Murphy.  Even if history does not directly relate to the IT field, we can still learn from it.  (I promise to keep the history lessons to a minimum!)