Attention Vonage; "pound sign" has a different meaning in the U.K.

What's a "pound sign?"

No really. Think about it. If you are in the U.S., you are liable to associate the term "pound sign" with that tic-tac-toe on your phone's dialpad. You know, #.

If you are British, though, the pound sign is the £ that appears with a currency notation. And as to the phone dialpad "pound sign" they call that the "hash" or "square" in the U.K.

I started thinking more about this issue after I saw a Vonage Forum thread this morning called American voice mail prompts: can we change them?

"Yes have to agree English prompts in the voicemail would be good," writes pje1979. "Especially as the voice refers to pressing pound which refers to hash in English but 99% of people will not have a clue what pound is."

Apparently, this has already occurred.

"Well its now happened. A caller to my line told me later that they didn't leave a message because some American women was asking them to do something they didn't understand.... ," writes bassplayer. Sort this out Vonage. Its a bug.

(Hey, bassplayer, I could tell you a thing or two of American women asking me to do something I didn't understand. But thas not about Vonage, and is for another conversation).

Another Vonage Forum Member, AdrianLee, is perturbed about the "pound sign" reference for more specific business reasons.

"I'm getting hassle from managers about this pound sign thing now which is pretty annoying, is this on a list 'to be fixed?' It's not a feature request, it's a bug report!'"," he writes. 
"It is frustrating that we've signed up to use this for a few business lines, and now our customers are going to think we sound oh so professional being asked to press a pound key and having no clue what that is..... ," he adds.

AdrianLee then closes his post with this zinger:
The American accents are a little annoying, but we can live with that if the actual information is accurate...."