11 ENGINEERS RECOVERED WIDOWER’S VOICEMAIL OF LATE WIFE

A widower got his late wife’s voice back after 11 engineers spent three days hunting down a deleted recording. That’s how the Stan Beaton voicemail saga ended.

Stan Beaton, 68, of Mirfield, had kept a recording of his wife Ruby’s voice since she died of cancer in 2003. By January 28, 2015, Virgin Media had recovered it and permanently saved it for him, the BBC reported.

“They’ve made this old age pensioner extremely happy,” Beaton said.

“It’s just a wonderful, wonderful sound that I thought was lost forever,” he said.

Why the recording mattered

The file was a saved recording of Ruby’s voice, kept by Beaton for years after her death.

He said he leaned on it, especially in the early days. “In the early days [I listened to it] quite often. Basically it came to the point when if I felt low then I would listen to it,” he said.

It was important enough that he held back from changing telecom companies. He said he had been told the message would not be kept if he switched.

The recording had survived until December 2014, Upworthy reported.

Then Virgin Media carried out technical work, and the message was deleted. Beaton said it disappeared that December.

“I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry,” he said.

“It really did devastate me,” he said.

Beaton contacted Virgin Media after discovering the loss. The company set out to get the message back.

A needle in a haystack

Rob Evans, Virgin Media’s executive director of engineering, said the hunt “was like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“The chances of its recovery were slim,” Evans said.

A team of 11 engineers spent three days trying to track the file down. They found the recording containing Ruby’s voice on a Friday.

Virgin Media did not wait to share it. “The next morning we called Stan to deliver the good news,” Evans said.

Beaton said the effort stunned him. “I’m staggered at the lengths they have gone to,” he said.

What happened next

Virgin Media planned to send Beaton a CD of the recording and make donations to charities he chose, Growing Bolder reported.