ABSTRACT
Once during a visit to a soft drink bottling plant I was impressed by the sight of a bottle inspector who spent every boring hour of every workday watching empty bottles go by. The bottles had been cleaned by automatic equipment, but there was then no machine other than the human inspector for detecting foreign objects that might have escaped the cleaning process. I want to use this bottle inspector to make a point about the way people sometimes misinterpret statistical tests and quality control procedures.
