Woman hangs up on $10000 call from Apple - CNET

Technology facilitates intrusion.

People weasel their way into our lives in order to sell us cable TV, a zoo membership, or enhanced reproductive organs.

So who could be surprised when Gail Davis, a woman in Orpington, England, picked up the phone, listened to someone offering her a prize, and immediately replied, "Thank you very much; I'm not interested"?

The only problem was that the caller really was someone from Apple and Davis really had won a prize. For her household was, indeed, the one from which the 10 billionth app had been downloaded from Apple's app store.

As the Cult of Mac tells it, Davis was brought to her senses by her daughters, one of whom had downloaded the free PaperGlider app, which is so utterly useful to humanity that Warren Buffett is probably playing it as we speak.

The 10 billionth app. One of the finest.

(Credit: Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Davis was distraught when she called Apple back and somehow the person on the company's helpdesk reportedly proved to be less than helpful. Perhaps Davis was already a marked woman. Perhaps it had been Apple COO Tim Cook himself calling to tell her she had won a $10,000 gift card.

Davis was mired in shame. As she told the Cult of Mac: "The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a genuine call. The girls were getting quite tense. They never would have forgiven me. They would have held it against me for all eternity."

Children hold all sorts of things against their mothers for all eternity, from looks to luck. But this would have been too much to bear.

Her eternity was made sweeter when she received another call from Apple. This time it was a colleague of Eddy Cue, Apple's VP of iTunes.

You might wonder why Cue himself didn't make the call. It could have been because it had, indeed, been Cue, rather than a telemarketer, who had made the original call and received a polite British brush-off.

So now Gail Davis and her family can download more apps and enjoy their fame. And Apple can content itself that it is now only Toshiba being rude to the company, rather than the woman whose family downloaded the 10 billionth app.