306 21.12.2011 22:16:36

One of the many 90s business trends was "three nines" -- businesses should strive for 99.9% accuracy, 99.9% customer satisfaction, 99.9% quality, etc.

Is 99.9% "good enough"? If so...

Two million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.

22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

1,314 phone calls will be misplaced by telecommunication services every minute.

12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.

268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year. [Gee: with the Firestones on Explorers, it looks like this one came true!]

14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year. [Well, yeah....]

103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year. [ditto!]

2,488,200 books will be shipped with the wrong cover in the next 12 months.

132,412,800 cans of soft drinks produced in the next 12 months will be flatter than one of the 268,500 defective tires.

Two plane landings daily at O'Hare International Airport will be unsafe.

3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.

880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.

$9,690 will be spent every day on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.

55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.

20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.

114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.

$761,900 will be spent on tapes and CDs that won't play.

107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed each day.

315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of English Language will be misspelled.

And you thought 99.9% was good enough!!