Yes...they do take your Sim out along with the battery and the memory card - so you end up with a sad little handful of phone guts. I take your point, but they didn't have any loan phones and most of us non-technophiles don't have spare phones kicking around all over the place, so I maintain that in the majority of cases their message was fairly useless. Particularly since they also had a landline number for me which they didn't bother with at all....
MartinSFP Fair enough Roger - in these days of being able to text landlines they should have tried that first. Does that service still have Tom Baker's voice? We used to have fun getting him to say 'hilarious' things!