At work, sometimes we talk about "six sigma". This is a statistical term that is fairly easy to understand. Assuming that processes exhibit random variation through a normal Gaussian distribution, the standard deviation (represented by the Greek letter sigma) is basically a measure of how wide the variation in your process is. One standard deviation is about 70%. The standard deviation measures how far from the average you must extend boundaries to cover 70% of the product. If my process is good to 1-sigma, then 70% of my product will fall within the specified limits.
I read a bit of a six-sigma book which points out that for most processes, 70% isn't very good. If 70% of the rulers in your ruler factory come out 13" long, not 12", you won't be in business for long. Two-sigma get you up to 95%, and three-sigma is 99.7%. 99.7% sounds really good, but it turns out that for some things, it really isn't. If the electric company gives you power for 99.7% of the year, then you will go about 26 hours and 17 minutes of the year without power. If a burger joint finds a way to ensure that 99.7% of it's burgers are e. coli free, dozens of people can still get sick in a single day. "Six-sigma" in business generally means producing less than 3.4 defects per 1,000,000 products.
I bring all this up, because our newspaper delivery person needs to learn that 95% isn't cutting it. Yesterday we had no paper by 10am, so we had to call them and have one sent over. Today, we were missing parts of our paper. 3 or 4 times over the last year we've received the Tribune instead of the Desert News. About once a month we receive no paper at all. We're even on our second carrier. Growing up, I never really kept track of when the paper came or anything but I never remember it being an issue at all. Every day the paper was simply there, and I took it for granted.
So, if you get the paper, and your carrier does a good job, appreciate them, because you could live in St. George.
2 comments:
I have to give the new carrier some credit - he's loads better than the old one. Since we've got him, I haven't ever had to call 4 days in a row to complain about the lack of a paper.
I just had to say that this post is hilarious. Maybe because I've heard about your problems with the paperboy before.
The first sentence in the third paragraph is pure gold. You've read all this technical stuff and you're thinking about statistics and quality and tolerance, and then you learn that this is all just to quantify exactly how much your paperboy sucks. Brilliant.
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