You're absolutely right PBTRUTH. Actually (from the Q3 2007 transcript), it's even worse:

"Matt Troy - Citigroup

A question; given a quarter that was very un-Pitney like, I know it’s difficult for you on that end, certainly for everyone on this end, I was just curious -- when did you first get a sense that the quarter was structurally beneath your expectations? Why weren’t you able to update investors sooner, given the magnitude of the miss? And I realize this could be just a perfect storm of several items coming together, but I wanted to get a directional sense of the items you listed, what were the major drivers of the shortfall? Were some more impactful than others? When did you get a sense that this quarter and your outlook for 4Q would be structurally beneath that which you previously articulated?

Murray D. Martin

Matt, as I mentioned, and as we’ve discussed, the results for a quarter tend to come in in the last week, in the last days, and that’s particularly true of our software business and of our lease trade-up business. And this is when we had expected to see a positive swing going forward. Now, we saw at that point that there were some challenges. We still expected to be towards the bottom end of the range, but we did not expect to be where we have come"