Dear Bob ... Your advice about knowing when good enough is good enough brought back a memory. Some years ago, OK, many years ago, I was a chemistry supervisor in a small hospital lab. Excellence was expected since mistakes can kill (really). We always tried to get the physician the absolutely positively 'right' answer. Precision and accuracy ruled. One day, an instrument was acting up, giving results that were b Dear Bob …Your advice about knowing when good enough is good enough brought back a memory.Some years ago, OK, many years ago, I was a chemistry supervisor in a small hospital lab. Excellence was expected since mistakes can kill (really). We always tried to get the physician the absolutely positively ‘right’ answer. Precision and accuracy ruled.One day, an instrument was acting up, giving results that were biased by 20% or so. We had a request from the emergency room for a blood sugar which needed to be run on the misbehaving system. Our turn around time was longer than usual and the physician came looking for the cause. As we explained that the delay was related to the instrument bias, he gave us his perspective on ‘right answer’.His patient was in a coma, possible caused by a very low or very high blood sugar. He need to know if the glucose was 10, 100, or 1000 so he could treat the patient. A 20% variation was meaningless to him. The ‘right’ answer was ‘good enough to help the physician make a decision’ and the range of ‘right’ answers wasn’t based on our concept of accuracy and precision. ‘Right as in accurate and precise’ that took 45 minutes and resulted in a dead patient was ‘wrong’. My world got a lot more gray that day!Doug FinnerDoug … That’s a great story.And of course, I’m sure you have other, equally “killer” stories about times when a 20% error would have been deadly. Gray indeed. That would give a person some gray hairs.– Bob ——– Technology Industry