It's not often that you go shopping, return empty-handed, and consider the trip a success.

I did yesterday, however. My two objectives were to sell a signet ring which my grandfather had left me many years ago and which I've been putting off doing anything about, and to buy some new footwear. So I went into town with the ring on my finger, on the grounds that this seemed like the best way not to lose it, and returned without it and with the new boots on my feet. (I was admittedly carrying my old shoes in my rucksack, which is sort of cheating on the ‘empty-handed’ stakes, but nothing I'd bought was in my hands or in my bag so I think the letter of the claim isn't violated. Quite.)

( wafflings about jewellers )

( wafflings about boots )

So I returned from my shopping trip with an absence of rings on my fingers and an absence of annoying laces on my toes, and nothing in my hands whatsoever. Success!

Someone apparently sent an SMS to my landline last night, which was very weird. I'd recently heard you could do this, but had been uncertain of exactly how it would work. What happened was that an automated message centre phoned me up and told me I had a message, then offered a menu of options including reading the message out loud. It also offered me the choice of deleting or keeping it, so I assume that if I hadn't answered the phone at all it would have kept it and perhaps tried again later.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem 100% prepared to deal with an answering machine, which is what it in fact got. It seemed to have started reading its automated spiel as soon as my answerphone picked up, which meant that what my answerphone actually recorded cut in half way through the incoming spiel after it had finished reading its outgoing automated spiel. So the first thing I heard was the second half of the sender's phone number, which was less than helpful.

Then it offered me a phone menu (press 1 to listen to the message, 2 to delete etc), and of course my answerphone did none of these things. Fortunately, after a delay it defaulted to reading the message at me (albeit rather badly). Then it gave me the menu again, and after a delay it read the message a second time, complete with the full sending number (aha!). After my answerphone did nothing the third time, it automatically deleted the message from the message centre, and proceeded to advertise the landline-SMS service at me, giving me two phone numbers and a URL. Then it hung up.

So I do know who the message was from (the phone number wasn't one I recognised, but I found out whose it was by typing it into Google, and the answer I got was consistent with what I could make out of the somewhat garbled message itself) and I basically know what it was trying to say, which I suppose is pretty good going. However, I'm mostly very amused at the idea of two machines talking to one another on the phone in English :-)

(Oddly, the text message appears to have come to me via BT Text, which is strange because I'm not a BT customer.)