Stan Beaton, a widower from London, kept the memory of his wife alive by keeping a voicemail recording of her voice. Ruby, Stan’s wife, recorded the voicemail message two years before she succumbed to stomach cancer in 2003.
In December, however, Stan was devastated when he realized that Virgin Media, his phone service provider, accidentally deleted the message when they were doing an upgrade of their system, the Telegraph reports.
The 68-year-old always listened to his wife’s voicemail recording whenever he felt lonely, and hearing his wife’s voice made him cheer up, as he said she was always a happy person.
“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. Sadly it disappeared. I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry.”
Virgin Media soon caught wind of the news and they dedicated 10 of their engineers to restore the recording. Executive director of engineering Rob Evans said that the task was difficult and the chances of getting the voicemail recording back were very slim.
However, after days of searching for the voicemail recording, the team of engineers was able to find it.
A reporter from BBC Radio visited Stan to surprise him. The video above shows what took place during the visit. Stan was so elated and choked up upon hearing his wife’s voice and was only able to utter the words, “Wonderful. Wonderful.”
In an interview, Beaton said that he was so grateful that they took great lengths just to be able to find the voicemail message.
“I suppose it’s gonna be a bit of a PR job now, but thank you, Virgin Media.”
According to BuzzFeed , Virgin Media will be sending Stan a copy of the recording and Stan said that he has a little surprise to the person who delivers it.
“I’ve got a nice bottle of Glenfiddich with their name on it.”
As an apology to Stan, Virgin Media will be making donations to several of Stan’s chosen charities.
[Image via YouTube ]
