Sunday, August 25, 2013

Ministry of Defence spent £40,000 on calling speaking clock in less than three years

The Ministry of Defence ran up a £40,000 bill on the speaking clock, despite a ban on staff calling it. Employees were reportedly banned from dialling 123 to check the time.

They were given a list of websites they could use to get the time free, but calls have continued - costing a total of £40,000 in less than three years.



An MoD spokesman blamed the "inadvertent spending" on a technical fault and said calls to the speaking clock had now stopped.

The final bill for 2012 was £18,804 and £15,162 in 2011, with more than £6,000 already spent this year. Over the period since the ban was announced, the MoD has made more than 130,000 calls at 30p each.

*checks clock on computer*

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

For L40K they could have had one of their own programmers come up with an in-house time number. Or was that too obvious?

Lurker111

arbroath said...

It's something I completely fail to understand, Lurker111.

For instance, they gave them a list of websites where they could check the time.

To view a website you need some kind of computer. So why not just look at the time on that?

Anonymous said...

I work for the MoD and I never got the memo... But I just look at the clock on the computer. Or on the wall. Or on the one on my phone.

Anonymous said...

Clandestine operations funding.

WilliamRocket said...

No, clandes time operations funding.


And, I have an idea, ... when we have proven we are not robots by descrambling the letters and digits, can you make it be that we can just keep on commenting, at least for a period of time ? Maybe 30 minutes ?
Promise I won't write too many comments and I won't get upset (on here) about meat eaters !

arbroath said...

I apologise about the Captchas, William Rocket, but the Blogger commenting system only allows that they are either turned on or off.

And if I turn them off, I get literally hundreds of spam comments every day.

So unfortunately they heve to be turned on.