Voicemail and Blinkenlights: Just Too Cool…
January 4th, 2006Now that our phone number has been transferred over to our Vonage service, I have hooked up our set of three Uniden DCT646 cordless telephones to the Vonage system. These phones have a little red LED that blinks furiously when the phone is ringing. I never much understood the point of having a light that blinks when you can clearly hear that the phone is ringing.
At one point, I briefly thought that maybe this light was so that people who are deaf or hard of hearing could tell that the phone is ringing, but then I realized how stupid that idea was. These phones have a piercing ring, and you’d have to be as deaf as a stump not to hear it. Yes, deaf people use telephones, but not Uniden audio-only headsets.
Tonight I discovered a new use for that light. When we have a voicemail message, the red light blinks twice every few seconds. Just the other day, I was saying to one of the guys at work that the only thing I’ll miss about our answering machine when we switch over to Vonage voicemail is that the answering machine makes it easy to tell if we have a message by looking for the red light on the machine. And here I have discovered that the phones we already own have exactly the same kind of light.
In fact, the Uniden blinkenlight is better than the answering machine’s light, because it blinks on every handset in the house. With the answering machine, you have to go into the kitchen to check for messages. And with Vonage, if you somehow miss the fact that the phone light is blinking, there’s also an audio cue when you have a new message: the dial tone “stutters’ for about five seconds when you first connect the handset.
I had a little trouble getting Vonage voicemail to send me an audio file containing my voicemail messages. I told the website I wanted my email notification configured that way, and the website showed that I had it configured that way, but my email notifications always arrived without the audio file. Eventually I hit upon the universal computer-age solution: turn it off, then turn it back on again. Once I did that, my audio attachments came through just fine.
January 5th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Ok this is a little freaky. I found your site through a trackback to my Measure Map post and saw the title to this post and was intrigued.
Here’s where it gets weird. We just bought the same phones to use with our Vonage system. **insert Twighlight zone music here**
I’m just kidding around, but still what are the chances? ;)