AT&T Wireless switched over to their new voicemail system sometime in the past week. I'd heard annoying notifications about it earlier this year when dialing my voicemail, but the notifications were so long and included such convoluted instructions that I never wrote them down. Then, in the past few days, I stopped receiving voicemail messages. You don't know that you're not receiving them--you just feel really ostracized for a few days--until someone asks you why you didn't return their call.
So yesterday I dialed my voicemail box and found 12 unheard messages. I didn't get to hear them until I walked through a the process of setting up my voicemail box again.
So this whole conversion was obviously a huge hassle. What amazing new benefits do I receive for having suffered through this conversion? If you know, please let me know. As far as I can tell, my voicemail works exactly the same. That AT&T didn't work to make the transition transparent to its users is one more example of how badly telecom companies treat their users.
One other footnote. In this new voicemail system, there's a binary flag to turn voicemail indicators on or off. Why would anyone want it off? Well, when my voicemail box was converted, it was reset to off, so my phone wouldn't show an icon to indicate I had messages waiting. I had to sit on the phone with a friendly AT&T customer service rep for 15 minutes last night while he turned the flag back on. How inane.