Most of us have become accustomed to Paul Reynolds' Scottish burr.Not so the hapless individual who transcribed Telecom's quarterly update last Friday.The official Thomson Reuters transcript (see screen shot above), which Telecom links to from its website
Most of us have become accustomed to Paul Reynolds’ Scottish burr.
Not so the hapless individual who transcribed Telecom’s quarterly update last Friday.
The official Thomson Reuters transcript (see screen shot above), which Telecom links to from its website, has the chief executive saying:
“I think big highlights in the quarter [sic] was one of the biggest deals Telecom's signed in recent years, a major ethernet Black Hole deal worth about NZD150 million for one of the major carriers in the New Zealand marketplace.
“We'll be delivering their ethernet Black Hole going forward across New Zealand and a major success for the whole business on which they've been working for quite some time.”
Oh dear. Has Dr Reynolds foreseen a Stephen Hawking-style apocalypse? (And does the business-speak cliché "going forward" still hold in the face of a time-warping singularity?)
Thankfully not.
NBR’s crack linguistics unit can reveal that Dr Reynolds was actually saying “back haul” (cable or wireless links between outlying infrastructure such as cellsites), not “black hole”.
As Private Bin types, the gloriously uncorrected version of the transcript is still on Thomson Reuters website here.
Incidentally, you’re probably wondering who the carrier was that took the $150 million contract with Telecom. Read about that here.
