Things I had to look up: tannoy

From a story today in the U.K. Guardian:

'We can't give you information. We haven't got a Tannoy'

The Guardian, Saturday March 29 2008

I knew we were in trouble when the man in the shiny suit appeared with a trolley of bottled water and granola bars.

Our British Airways flight from Vancouver had already been delayed twice -- trouble refuelling and trouble finding somewhere to dock -- but even as we walked into the crowded but strangely inactive baggage hall in the new Terminal 5, nobody was telling us that we had just flown into the sort of fiasco that the British seem to do so particularly well.

Queues had already formed at the customer assistance desks but the smiling, slightly wild-eyed staff had almost nothing to offer. Even after six hours of chaos, nobody had been briefed. Nobody knew anything. The desks, probably knocked together by a carpenter some time during the night, were bare. I'm not even sure they had telephones. Not that it would have helped if they had. "I have tried calling," one young woman told me, waving a sheet of contact numbers. "But nobody's answering." ... As the jet-lagged crowd slumped on the floor in the vast baggage claim area (the genius of the Richard Rogers Partnership did not extend to a single chair or bench), BAA officials were keen to impress on us that they had done their job. The lights were on. The conveyor belts were turning. BA officials meanwhile blamed the BAA computer systems. And all the time, every 10 minutes, an Essex voice was cheerily announcing in a loop designed to send even a strong man insane: "British Airways would like to apologise for the delay to baggage collection. British Airways are doing their best to address the situation."

"Why can't you give out some proper information?" I asked a BA manager. "We can't," he wailed. "We don't have any -- and anyway, they haven't given us a Tannoy."

It turns out that "Tannoy Ltd is a British manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems," and that the phrase is also used -- as implied in the headline of that story -- informally to mean being informed or paged, as in a comment this bebo profile reading:

I managed to lose my purse -- without my knowledge -- till i got a tannoy from the front desk and was proper confused as to how exactly they knew i was in the library in the first place...