Fuddland
BT has introduced a new service, BT Text, which — amongst other things — will convert any SMS text message sent to a landline number into a voice message read by a pretty realistic-sounding female computer voice. This is potentially a very handy service, but because I’m one of those people [that is, me and the rest of the universe] that opens the phone bill and immediately discards all the information pamphlets that it contains with giving them a second glance, I found out about the service in a very confusing way.
The other day I invited a friend of mine around for a cuppa on her way home from work. I then promptly forgot that I’d invited her round. Early in the evening the telephone rang, and when I picked it up I was greeted with a voice which said, “BT Text message from [mobile telephone number] … ‘On my way’”.
I was completely thrown by this message, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’m one of those people [again, this Venn diagram consists of one circle representing the universe, and another, overlapping circle, representing myself] who, since the advent of mobile phones, has forgotten how to commit telephone numbers to memory, so I had no idea whose number had just been read out to me.
Secondly, the voice which said “On my way” sounded different from the beginning of the message [which was the familiar BT woman voice, for those of you who have heard it], and to my unprepared ears, sounded like a real person had recorded a message and got BT to deliver it to me somehow. So I was wracking my brains in several directions, trying to figure out who this mystery woman was that was “on her way”, whilst tapping through my phone book comparing the entries with the number I’d just heard, and also trying to figure out how they’d got BT to deliver a voice message to my phone.
I didn’t have time to resolve any of these pursuits because the doorbell rang and, upon opening it and seeing the friend I had invited standing there, the sound of a several pennies dropping rattled around my head.
My friend had accidentally sent her message to my landline instead of my mobile number, and due to BT deciding to go ahead and provide me with BT Text without explictly asking me, she didn’t get the usual “message failed” warning one used to get when attempting to text a landline number. There’s probably a moral to all of this, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
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