Too Many Phone Options

I have caller ID through my local phone company. I also have two old corded phones. And one cordless phone.

Until recently, the caller ID on the cordless phone was working just fine. And I almost never used it. The cordless phone is upstairs, and in the evening, I am almost always downstairs. When the phone rings, I don't actually run upstairs to look at the cordless phone before answering. In fact, much of the time, I don't answer the phone at all. If the phone hangs up in the middle of my answering machine message, then I know it was an automatic dialer and not a call I wanted to take. If someone leaves a message, I can usually hear it and know that I have a call that I may really need to return. It's been a pretty good system.

But the one aspect of the caller ID on the cordless phone that I did use quite a bit was the redial of a number in the caller ID directory. For example, my niece might call me. To call her back, all I would have to do is go through the caller ID list and pull up her number and dial it. Much easier than looking her number up. It only works for local calls, but many of the people who call me are local. So all in all, I found this a convenience.

But recently, my caller ID on my cordless phone stopped working. Unfortunately, neither of my corded phones have this function. I called the local phone company, and they checked their system. They said all looked fine from their end. Hmmm.....

The cordless phone also came with an answering machine. As with the caller ID, I have voice mail through my local phone company. I never use that service - it came with the calling plan - I just use the answering machine that came with the cordless phone. But I noticed the other day when I went to make a call, that the dial tone was three short beeps. Which meant I had a voice mail, not a message on my answering machine. As I said, however, I had never used this system. I hadn't even set up a password for it. But I had noticed it right before I called the local phone company about my caller ID issue, so I asked them about my voice mail service. They gave me the number to call to check voice mail and to set up a voice mail system with my voice on it. Which I did. I had four voice mails, including one that was over a year old. Very strange.

So after these two episodes, I thought why don't I get a newer cordless phone - one that has caller ID and no answering machine. That way, hopefully my caller ID problem might be solved, but at a minimum, I would be able to get rid of having an answering machine and a voice mailbox.

Did you know you can't buy a cordless phone without an answering machine? Every single style and manufacturer, even if they had multiple cordless extensions, had at least one with an answering machine.

Now I suppose it's possible that I could "disable" the answering machine on the cordless phone. I know other people who have cordless phones and phone company voice mail. There has to be a way to do this.

But it seems more complicated than it needs to be. And in the meantime, I still don't have functioning caller ID. And I have two methods to get messages. From all those auto-dialers.