A few months ago a local restaurant had a Groupon which my wife purchased. It was a 5 course dinner for 2 for $20 on weeknights, or $30 for Thursday - Sunday. Within 2 days she received an email from Groupon stating that the restaurant was no longer honoring the deal. Groupon gave us a full credit (not refund, just money we could use towards another deal) Ever since this, my wife has not wanted to go back there.
The irony of this was that we discovered this restaurant through a different deal website, and it quickly became somewhat of a regular for us. Honoring a previous deal made us customers, not honoring a subsequent deal made us no longer customers.
I worked for a small(er) cable company 15 years ago, in their community Television department. We covered city council meetings, parades, had several shows about life in Cleveland etc. It has changed ownerships a few times, and is now Time Warner, and I stopped in not to long ago to see if I still knew anybody who worked there.
The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the customer service reps behind bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard sitting in there.
If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...
One of the most touching things I ever had on Xbox Live was when I received a message I from a friend who always seemed to be on, but not in the previous 2 weeks. The message was from his mother thanking me, and everyone on his friends list for being his friend and telling us he had passed away. She continued to tell us he had Downs Syndrome, and at 21 years of age had passed away from complications of it. She told us that we, his virtual friends were the only friends he really seemed to have, because we didn't know about, or judge him because of his condition.
Would this system have deprived him of the one joy he had in his life because he couldn't run the hundred meter dash, or didn't match up with some other physical standard?
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.