fedward, tumbling

goes on, and the heat goes on
~ Tuesday, July 22 ~
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AT&T has a nasty habit of completely resetting your voicemail whenever anything happens either to your device or to your account.  In this particular case the catalyst seems to have been the change to a FamilyTalk plan. Now.  There’s no good technical reason this has to happen.  They could change anything about your account and keep the voicemail box untouched based on the number, but no.  They reprovision at the drop of a hat.  And this time, a total of three things happened wrong, not just the one you’d expect: Why did they reprovision it at all?  My number didn’t change. When they did this, they forgot to push the “Visual Voicemail” button, so I now am going to have to call them and put up with the idiocy on their end in order to get it turned on, which I’m sure will involve yet another total reset of the mailbox. The iPhone, for whatever reason, didn’t actually pick up on the change. That last one is why the picture exists.  If you called me before I diagnosed the problem, you couldn’t leave me a message at all.  You’d get a message from AT&T saying they needed more information, and if you punched in my number it wouldn’t work.  On the phone, however, I could still check my voicemail just fine.  It was just that no new messages ever showed up. After a bit of poking around I found the code to find out what your forwards are on a GSM phone:  *#61#.  In this case the phone was forwarding to a voicemail system at +14432803092.  If you called that number directly you’d get the same “more information” message, and if you punched in my number you’d get the “Sorry, could not find a mailbox for that number” message. After a bit more poking around I found the SMS standard code #002#, which will remove any and all forwards for your number. I did that, and the iPhone automatically picked up the correct number from the network, as pictured (+14432803091 - one digit off from what had been there). Now if you call me you can actually leave me a message. Still unexplained is why it is necessary to reset the voicemail in the first place, or why the idiots at AT&T forgot to turn on visual voicemail for both our iPhones when they changed the plan.

AT&T has a nasty habit of completely resetting your voicemail whenever anything happens either to your device or to your account.  In this particular case the catalyst seems to have been the change to a FamilyTalk plan.

Now.  There’s no good technical reason this has to happen.  They could change anything about your account and keep the voicemail box untouched based on the number, but no.  They reprovision at the drop of a hat.  And this time, a total of three things happened wrong, not just the one you’d expect:

  1. Why did they reprovision it at all?  My number didn’t change.
  2. When they did this, they forgot to push the “Visual Voicemail” button, so I now am going to have to call them and put up with the idiocy on their end in order to get it turned on, which I’m sure will involve yet another total reset of the mailbox.
  3. The iPhone, for whatever reason, didn’t actually pick up on the change.

That last one is why the picture exists.  If you called me before I diagnosed the problem, you couldn’t leave me a message at all.  You’d get a message from AT&T saying they needed more information, and if you punched in my number it wouldn’t work.  On the phone, however, I could still check my voicemail just fine.  It was just that no new messages ever showed up.

After a bit of poking around I found the code to find out what your forwards are on a GSM phone:  *#61#.  In this case the phone was forwarding to a voicemail system at +14432803092.  If you called that number directly you’d get the same “more information” message, and if you punched in my number you’d get the “Sorry, could not find a mailbox for that number” message.

After a bit more poking around I found the SMS standard code #002#, which will remove any and all forwards for your number. I did that, and the iPhone automatically picked up the correct number from the network, as pictured (+14432803091 - one digit off from what had been there). Now if you call me you can actually leave me a message.

Still unexplained is why it is necessary to reset the voicemail in the first place, or why the idiots at AT&T forgot to turn on visual voicemail for both our iPhones when they changed the plan.