99.9% success rate – that’s good, right?
You often hear people say that they have a “99.9% success rate”. Well, if that is acceptable, then:
- 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped/year.
- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled/hour.
- 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year.
- 2.5 million books will be shipped with the wrong covers.
- Two planes landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport will be unsafe every day.
- 315 entries in Webster’s Dictionary will be misspelled.
- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written this year.
- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.
- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly during the year.
- 5.5 million cases of soft drinks produced will be flat.
- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly.
- 3056 copies of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections
- A typical day would be 24 hours long (give or take 86.4 seconds).