>>The absolute worst error you could make was to forget to put the rubber band around the deck of cards before you left to submit them to the card reader. It was a forgone conclusion you would trip and scatter the entire deck and spend hours re-sortting.
>
>You had cards? All we ever had were the elastic bands.

Since that sounds like a Monty Python joke, I thought you'd appreciate the Monty-Python-esqueness of this: One company I know took a stack of cards and tossed them down the stairs and took the cards from every third stair to produce a random sample. That continued until I moved them up to FoxPro. ;)