by BB Curtis

We all know that doing our best should be a regular practice.  We have our lazy days, though, when we feel that we can slide by with a little less than 100%.  We come up with all sorts of excuses for not doing our best.  We blame everybody else . . . the kids kept me up late; the dog barked all morning and then puked on the carpet right before I had to leave the house; I’m having a bad hair day.  We decide that 99% will do.

I’m going to get straight to the point (I guess that would be a pyramid).  There are over 7 million surgeries performed each year in the U.S. alone.  70,000 of them would be lawyers’ delights if surgeons went by the “99% Is OK” rule.  Over 2.6 million head of cattle are inspected each year before they go to slaughter and end up on your dinner table.  That means 28 million pounds of beef that are not fit for dog food would be sold for human consumption each year if the inspectors all decided that “We Can Get by with That”.  If 10 million computers are built and sold annually, then 100,000 non-functional computers would be in stores and online for us to purchase.  If pharmacists lived by the “That’s Good Enough” philosophy, then 30 million of the 3 billion prescriptions filled in the past year would be incorrect.  Over 50 million cars came off assembly lines from August 2003 to July 2004.  The 99% rule says that 500,000 would be defective.

Imagine the poor slob who sits down for a glorious T-bone, which is more difficult than usual to cut and chew, becoming violently ill a few hours later from the tainted meat.  He turns on his computer to see if there is any news concerning bad beef in his community, but the jacked-up piece of crap gives him nothing but the blue screen of death.  He then jumps in his new car, puking all the way, turns the key, and . . . pop, splat, fizzle; it dies halfway down the driveway.  His neighbor kindly takes him to the ER where, instead of pumping his stomach, they cut off his left foot.  When he comes to, instead of the nurse giving him the pain pill that the doctor ordered, the pharmacist put a blood thinner in the little, white paper cup.  He swallows it and an hour later his brand new stump is bleeding like a fountain.

I was going to quote religious philosophy from Christianity to Zen Buddhism and give references to several motivational speakers, but I decided it really wasn’t necessary.  You tell me – is Good Enough Good Enough?

By the way, according to the article “Prescription Errors Rising” at ConsumerAffairs.com, the number of prescription drug errors annually is 5%, not just 1%; and those errors are the cause of about 7,000 deaths each year.

© Bobbi Bartsch Curtis 2009, All Rights Reserved