The hospital where I see newborns is supposed to notify me if a baby is born. I then go and examine the child and speak with the mother. At about 4 one afternoon I got a call from the nursery wondering where I was and why I hadn't checked out a baby that had been born early that morning.

When a newborn arrives in the nursery the nurses are supposed to call me on my cell phone. I checked, and there was no record of the call on the log within the phone. However, the nurse checked her own log book and a call, sure enough, had been placed.

I told the nurse I would be there after work and ended up seeing the infant at 8:30 at night. Perplexed by the contradictory logs, I inspected the nursery records and found that of the 10 digits in the phone number they had nine right and one wrong. They had mixed up the four for a seven. The night staff had called the wrong number.

In spite of the inconvenience for me, but more importantly the exhausted mother who had labored all night and then had to have a C-section, I couldn't get upset over a simple mistake. The nurse had gotten nine digits right. She was batting .900. Had it been a graded test, 90 percent is an A. How many times in our school career would we have been ecstatic for such an A?

Yet in the end it was the wrong number. Someone, somewhere knows there was an 8-pound 3-ounce baby boy born by C-section with Apgar scores of 8 and 9.

What if as individuals and as a society we became satisfied with 90 percent? We would get our luggage 90 percent of the time at the right time and airport. For some airlines that may be an improvement, but still that would mean 1 out of 9 times your shirts or dresses would be in Denver and you would be in Orlando. And 10 percent of the time you really had wanted Cleveland not Florida. The waiter would get the order 9 out of 10 times. Maybe you will get the salmon, but maybe not.

What about 90 percent musicians? The orchestra with all the horns and strings hitting 90 percent of the notes 90 percent of the time would make an interesting sound. We could only hope that financial advisers were correct 90 percent on their predictions, or that politicians fibbed on only 90 percent of their promises. Juries would convict one out of 10 people unjustly and clocks would be wrong only one out of 10 hours of the day.