“Leaving a voice mail is no more reliable than putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea.”
See my response below. ANY commercial grade phone system installed in the last 20 years or so has “voicemail to email” capabilities. They also have a “Find Me-Follow Me” functionally which can be enabled by the SysAdmin or the User.
For example, my phone is set to ring my desk phone 2 times, then my cell phone 2 times, then pull the call back to Company voicemail. The VM is covered to a .Wav file and sent to me company email as an attachment.
The subject of said email is the Caller ID with name and number. It can even be tagged as “Urgent” if the caller wishes.
I’ve been designing and selling phone systems made by 4 different premise based companies and 3 different Hosted providers for 25 years. The days of having to go back to the Office, seeing the flashing light on your phone, and dialing into the system have been over for decades.
Hell, it’s almost impossible for me NOT to get a phone call from customers or colleagues unless I specifically tag myself Unavailable in the system which, by the way, automatically cross checks my Calendar to see what I’m doing at that particular time.
So unless the California DOT bought their Enterpise grade phone system from WalMart there’s no excuse for this. None.
L
Not to mention Florida.
That’s all very nice. We agree that it was inexcusable, just for different reasons.
I’m retired and not on my phone every ten seconds. If I get out of my chair and go to the bathroom, and while I’m gone a voice mail arrives, I might not even become aware that I have a voicemail for days.
And...four rings, then to voicemail?
Back in the dim recesses of antiquity, when a phone was a black bakelite lump tethered to a wall, the rule was to let it ring 10 times before giving up.