I know someone who was a volunteer fireman.  He sees potential causes of fires everywhere.  I have a mate who was a volunteer ambulance officer who is against decriminalisation of marijuana because of all of the call outs he had that involved people who were stoned.

So what has all of this got to do with this electronics blog you might ask.  But just hang on a minute while I explain.  As a technician I always see electronics stuff that is broken or blown up or somehow playing up so it is easy to start thinking that the products are unreliable.  The reality though is that I only see a small percentage of the products that are sold and without knowing the sales figures or the total number of products that have failed I have no idea how reliable they are.

The moral of this story is that the fireman and the ambulance officer and the technician have to rely on sound data rather than personal experience to make judgements.