11 ENGINEERS FOUND WIDOWER’S LOST VOICEMAIL OF HIS WIFE

Virgin Media engineers recovered the lost voicemail of a Mirfield man’s late wife after technical work on the company’s systems wiped it out. Stan Beaton, 68, had kept the recording of his wife Ruby’s voice since she died of cancer in 2003, and it took a team of 11 engineers three days to find it, the BBC reported on January 28, 2015.

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

Hearing it again, he called it “just a wonderful, wonderful sound that I thought was lost forever.”

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

A voice he refused to give up

The recording was Ruby’s voice, and Beaton had held onto it for more than a decade. He told BBC Radio Leeds that he played it often at first. Over time, it became something he turned to on bad 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 also shaped his choices as a customer. Beaton said he stayed put with his provider for years because no other company would promise to keep the message.

“I’ve always resisted changing companies because whenever I mentioned that my wife’s voice was our voicemail message and would it be retained and each company said no, so that’s why I never changed,” he said.

The recording lasted until December 2014, according to Upworthy. Then Virgin Media carried out technical work, and the message was deleted.

“Sadly it disappeared. I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry,” Beaton said.

“In December I learned that it had disappeared. I just could not tell people how it affected me at that time. It really did devastate me.”

Eleven engineers and a needle in a haystack

Beaton contacted Virgin Media, and the company put its engineers on the case. Rob Evans, the company’s executive director of engineering, said finding the file “was like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

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

Eleven engineers spent three days on the search. The missing file containing Ruby’s voice turned up on Friday, January 23, 2015.

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

The message has now been permanently saved for Beaton.

Virgin Media also planned to send him a CD of the recording and make donations to charities of his choosing, Growing Bolder reported.