It is a weird world

Sometimes something that seems incredibly difficult, turns out to be a lot simpler than you thought. For a long time now, and I mean years not just months, we have been irritated by the fact that our telephones gave us a beeping rather than a dial tone. But they still worked. Our local capable of anything guru was round at the week end to cut up a tree that had fallen on my wife’s sunning chair. After he had solved that problem for us we sat down for a beer, and I mentioned the telephone problem. He went and tried the phone and said that the sound we heard was message waiting on our voicemail, I did not think we had voicemail as we use an answering machine, but he said try # 99 which I did and was informed that I had no messages, the beeping continued.

I googled beeping messenger noise and after a while found an option that explained how to remove it on certain varieties of phone, but not on the ones I had. It also had a contact number which unfortunately I did not note down. This morning in desperation I went to the Bell Aliant website and sorted out the right place to call with a problem with your phone, after the usual delay listening to loud music, I got a human being on the line. He wanted lots of detail to establish who I was and what my phone number was, and when I said the problem was that I could not stop getting a “you have a voice mail message”. He said it was impossible as we were not paying for voicemail. We spent ten minutes in continuous and growing more heated argument, but he would not accept that it was anything to do with Bell.

Before sending an irate email to the President of Bell Canada, I had one more try with Google. It had a method to stop the message report, #94!

It worked. It is a pity that the staff at the telephone company do not know their own rules.

While I was making dinner last night, the phone rang. It was Bell Aliant asking how my service request had been handled. On a scale of 1 to 5 there was no minus ten, but they did ask for my comments to be recorded. They probably melted the tape.