- Humour - Guy's homepage - Steelpillow -

Listen to the recordings below !

A colleague emailed this to me, and I just couldn't resist giving it a wider audience.

Airport announcers were tricked into making these announcements under the pretence that they were foreign names.

Here is the story ...

"We‘d go and sit on the balcony at Terminal 3 at Heathrow, directly under one of the speakers as the roof is low. We put the tape machine in our bag with the microphone poking out of the top. We‘d look for a flight that had arrived in the last 40 minutes from somewhere where you‘d expect mental names, then write a letter saying, 'Could you go and pick up etc. etc. from flight, etc.' That way, it looked like it‘d been arranged in advance as the flight arrival details were written on the note. We also wore an ID-style badge and carried a mobile so that we looked like taxi drivers. One of us would get the first one read out and then the other did the second. We‘ d pretend to be unable to pronounce it and then hand them the bit of paper with the name written on it. Long winded, but well worth it!

"We got rumbled doing the 'My colleague just, etc.' They actually threatened to arrest us as apparently they‘d actually had complaints over the previous weeks! We were toying with doing it again just to see what they‘d arrest us for, but we rang Chris and all he said was, 'Go to Gatwick!' This is the reason the last one sounds so crap ‘cos Gatwick is a much noisier place and the ceilings are high, and it was difficult to get near a speaker. The lengths we had to go to ...."

Now, click the speakers to download and play the announcements. You can also click here to download a zipped MS Word document (347KB) with them all embedded.

- Humour - Guy's homepage - Steelpillow -