Mighty-fine Friday afternoon BBC fun

16 Mar, 2012

This morning, we received an email from a low-traffic but high-subscriber BBC mailing list about a software update. Half an hour later, with "please remove me!" and "stop emailing me!" replies mounting up, it was threatening to balloon into a genuine Friday crisis with frustrated BBC workers getting buried under a mountain of mail.

But where some might see the word 'crisis', we see the word 'opportunity' - a prime opportunity for some Friday afternoon fun:

"Hi guys - so I found a way to remove yourself from the mailing, it's pretty simple:

One way to just email tech support, but that can take a long time. The quickest route is to call the unsubscribe hotline at [actual phone number, but removed for this blog post].

Hope this helps!"

So what would you get on the phone number? Listen away:

Of course, the joke was on us, because BBC tech support had already shut down the reply-to-all function of that list in the mere 20 minutes it took to write, record, and set this up, so it didn't get the widespread coverage we had hoped.

Well played, sirs! But next time, we will be there...