Ugh... A few companies back, there was a problem where we were provisioning phone numbers that appeared directly in ads and too few numbers caused problems, bu

Ugh... A few companies back, there was a problem where we were provisioning phone numbers that appeared directly in ads and too few numbers caused problems, but of course it costs money to do the provisioning. I don't know much about queue theory, but I immediately recognized that this was a queue theory problem, and recommended we figure out the answer as such. I got blank stares and "how about we just provision 10 numbers more than we think we need" or something like that. Sometimes a quick answer like that is better than wasting a lot of engineering time over optimising, but this was actually fairly critical to their business and they were spending significant amounts on the ads and phone numbers and needed both to work well.