I don't mean this to reflect on your situation Sospan.
There is a famous story (maybe true) about Steve Jobs going to meet with Sony in order to secure the output of some of the first hard discs for the Mac.
He assumed a failure rate of 5% and so ordered 1050 drives in the first order. Sony asked why 1050 and he explained that it was to allow for the 5% of failed units among them.
When the shipment arrived there was a box with 1000 units and a smaller box next to them. It contained the 50 deliberately broken drives with a note to that effect!
The version I heard it was IBM and memory chips. I forget the Japanese company involved.
Dave
