Is 99.9% "Good Enough"?

I copied this from the Jumbo Joke web site.

This hit my mailbox in Fall 1996. 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!!