Emergency sausage incident shames BT
Published: 05 May 2000 09:11 BST
The woes of BT (quote: BT) reached a new low this week thanks to an inexplicable emergency message about a mouldy sausage that was accidentally issued to police forces across the country.
This embarrassing mistake occurred after Aberdeenshire mother of two, Alison McKenzie, called an emergency environmental health hotline to complain that an meat sausage she purchased for £1.75 had gone mouldy.
Thanks to a BT telephone network error, this irritating, but hardly life-threatening alert was then sent to the emergency telephone lines used by police departments around the country to inform people of serious incidents.
The message was bizarrely also sent to all pagers with the prefix 01426. Because the message also contained Ms McKenzie's name and phone number, she soon began receiving thousands of calls from baffled doctors, nurses and police officers.
"I have had calls from 20-year-olds and people in their 70's," an exasperated Ms MckEnzie told The Guardian. "I had so many that in the end I had to put my answer machine on because the line was being inundated."
What do you think? Tell the Mailroom. And read what others have said.
Did you find this article useful?
58 out of 94 people found this useful
- Share this article:
