Close enough to perfect?

In a column I wrote Sunday for Mother’s Day, I interviewed a 57-year-old woman who was searching for her birth mother.

She had been adopted and raised by a family in Macon, and had a “stepsister’’ who was 8 years older. Six month ago, she had a DNA test which revealed her stepsister was actually her half-sister. The test concluded the two women had the same father.

She said the test was 99.9 percent positive.

I don’t know if I should ever take 99.9 percent as conclusive. I guess there is always that small fraction of a chance.

But she felt pretty certain about it, and I did, too.

The day after the column was published, I happened to come across something I had saved from several years ago called “If 99.9 Percent Is Good Enough …” I don’t know the source, but I found it pretty interesting.

If 99.9 percent is good enough, then …

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


• 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled every hour.


• 2 million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.


• 2.5 million books will be shipped with the wrong covers.


• 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 incorrectcardholder information on their magnetic strips.


• 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly during the year.


• 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly.