Mother of two Alison McKenzie sparked a nationwide panic yesterday when she complained about some mouldy Safeway sausages.

The spicy Spanish delights were quickly replaced by the supermarket but due to a fault in a BT exchange, the complaint was relayed to police voicebanks and hundreds of pagers.

Alison was more than a little surprised when she started getting home phone calls from police forces, doctors, nurses and businessmen asking her what they could do about the green goblins.

"In the end I had to put my answering machine on - my line was inundated," Alison said. "One man was annoyed that I had got his pager number but he started laughing when I explained."

And you thought we hadn't learnt our lesson from the BSE crisis. ®