After some off-and-on stumbles where I have had to use Google Voice to keep my voicemail (it's been a long time since I've used that, by the way), this past year I think I've been able to manage them. I am a hoarder even when it comes to voicemail. And I've been trying since I got my first cellphone to keep as many messages as I can.
Sometimes it's hard. Before I would store so many that I would run up to my limit, which, for some reason, was around 45 voicemails. (You would think advances in technology would mean an end to limits, but that's just me.) That's why I got Google Voice. But in the past five, maybe ten years there has been a marked shift away from calling people and leaving messages to texting. I have seen that manifested in the number of voicemails I have received, and thus kept. Therefore, it's been a whole hell of a lot easier to keep all the voicemails I have.
Right now, my earliest message is from over a year ago, from the early summer of 2014, from the rental car company we used to get a minivan on the family roadtrip to Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City and Vegas. And besides the occasional robomessage from, say, the local pharmacist saying that my or Father's medication is ready to be picked up (which I delete after some time), I kept them without a problem.
Until a few weeks ago. You know that when you check your voicemail and it goes, "You have ... # messages." When I heard that and it went down into the teens, when I knew I had at least 30, I knew I blew it. I don't know about other services, but T-Mobile gives a warning that messages have to be re-saved after some time or else it'll be automatically deleted. Before when that happened I couldn't bear to delete them myself, so I would switch my v-mail service to Google Voice and not use the voicemail on my phone for a while. Then, I would go back to see that I have no messages because they were taken from me. That's OK, because I was passive and didn't do anything to remove my messages. They were removed for me. It's another way for me to float through life.
But I didn't want to avoid the responsibility of preserving my messages this time around because I had fewer of them. And since I was able to keep voicemails from over a year ago, I thought the task would be easier. Just find an idle time in my day, call up the v-mail, and hit the "9" button over and over (unless it was a completely unimportant call, in which case I would be able to free up space by deleting it). Those idle times were usually breaks during work.
And that may be why I lost those messages. Once I became unemployed, I got so lazy and attached to doing other fun things that the routine of checking voicemail was completely gone from my mind. I even remember thinking to myself, "Geez, I should check my messages." Hell, I remember checking my messages when I received a new one, but decided to delay re-saving my old ones for another time. And stupid me, I never got around to doing that.
At least completely. It's weird in that I did find enough time to save the earliest messages, like the one from the car rental company, but not ones later than that. Seems as if I did, at least once, check my voicemails, but only for a certain time, after which I lost interest and thought I'd get to it later. Well, I didn't get to it later because I was busy enjoying unemployment. Therefore, I lost more recent messages, such as one my former Vice-President, and several calls from The Other Mechanic Around The Corner. Not the worst things in the world, sure, but I wanted to keep them, and through my laziness and oversight I just plain forgot.
Well, now I have about 30 messages again, and I am working again, so maybe this time I will remember to keep them all. Wish me luck.
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