Source: (1991) InSight, Syncrude Canada Ltd., Communications Division

IF 99% IS GOOD ENOUGH, THEN ...

- 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.

- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

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

- 14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.

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

- Two plane landings daily at O' Hare International Airport in Chicago 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 strip.

- $761,900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and CDs that will not play.

- 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.

- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

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

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

- 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

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

- Homes would be without electricity, heat, water, and telephone service for 15 minutes every day.

- Every page of the telephone directory would contain four wrong numbers.

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), November 22, 1999

Answers

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

My audio book club last week sent me the correct invoice with the wrong book enclosed. When I tried to call I couldn't get through due to a traffic jam which has never happened before. It gave me reason to speculate and ponder a bit.

There's nothing worse than seeing a package in the mailbox, ones stomach takes a flip, there is a silent "It's here! It's here!" And one is a bit conscience of how suppressed and hopefully normal appearing ones step is to the mail box, only to open the package and discover It's Not Here.

-- Paula (chowbabe@pacbell.net), November 22, 1999.

Probably not a good time to have things automatically shipped and BILLED I would think. What do you mean the tape cost $156,295.32 plus $9,406.00 shipping?

-- squid (Itsdark@down.here), November 22, 1999.

good post snooze!!!

-- C. Hill (pinionsmachine@hotmail.com), November 22, 1999.

Pop quiz: If 99% of the embedded systems in a production line keep working, how many completed products will roll off the end of it?

A) 100% B) 99% C) 0%

Answer: We'll all C soon.

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), November 23, 1999.

Thanks, snooze. I don't think it's OT at all. Not a bit.

-- Arewyn (isitth@latealready.com), November 23, 1999.

What makes this whole thing so hard, in a nutshell, is that *any one* of Colin's proposed answers could be correct, depending on what fails and how it fails. Sysman, at one time, said that if we corrected *exactly* the correct 5% of the bugs, we'd have a BITR. If we corrected *only* the other 95%, we may as well not have bothered!

All bugs are not created equal. Neither is all code. So it's a crap shoot.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 23, 1999.