Friday, May 24, 2013

About to...

A text arrives from a building society:
Your mortgage offer is about to expire. Please take urgent action to confirm how you wish to proceed, or the offer will expire and all fees will be lost.
In fact, the mortgage offer does not expire for another month. The offer in question actually lasts for three months in total. So the offer is "about to expire" after 2/3 of its time. If your lifespan is three score years and ten, that is like saying that you are "about to expire" when you are 46. (I thought this would make the message sound absurd but, in a morbid frame of mind, it makes it seem entirely reasonable.)

It is not the most useful message to send. Particularly as no contact details are given in the text, and they used some clever number-cloaking system so that it is not possible to reply, phone, or indeed do anything about it.

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