I have a BT cordless phone with a built-in answering machine. On the base unit is a green LED that flashes if someone’s left a message. Cool, eh? Not only that, but it also flashes, just the same, if you’ve missed a call. OK, well maybe some people like to know if someone tried to ring while they were out - I don’t care, but maybe that’s just me. Oh, and it also flashes if you’ve received a call and answered it. In other words, it flashes to warn you that someone rang you, whether or not you, y’know, spoke to the person or not.
So, of course, you need to reset it after a call if you want to be warned of messages waiting rather than “you’ve just been on the phone, so I’ll flash to remind you”.
The procedure for that is to navigate the menus on the handset, down to the incoming calls list, then scroll through all the calls you’ve received since you last did this, one by one, then come back up one level and select “Delete old numbers”. That’s 13 keystrokes if you’ve been called once, and an additional keystroke (plus a half-second delay) for each subsequent number.
That alone was enough to make me buy a replacement after a year or so. My thumb was almost dropping off.
Oh, and ditto on the lack of a reset on modem/routers. I’ve just had to pull the plug on mine, happens every couple of days. What is it with those things that they crash so often? Even Windows stays up for longer than that.
My phone does the same damned thing. But even better: you need to do a similar procedure on every handset, so that they’ll all stop flashing. Screw it, I’ll just guess if someone called or I have a message.
One of the things that bugs me most about Microsoft Office is when I fire up Excel (the Mac version) and go to the “recent documents” tab to open one of the spreadsheets I used yesterday. It defaults to showing all recent Word docs, PowerPoint docs, databases, spreadsheets, and anything else Microsoft might lay claim to. I opened Excel, dammit. I want a spreadsheet. If I had wanted to open the last PowerPoint presentation I made, I would have opened PowerPoint.
Verizon cell phones behave similarly - they’ll beep every couple of minutes to be sure you eventually pick up the phone to see who called and/or left a voicemail. At least with them, all you have to do is open the phone to abort the beeping.
As for the home broadband routers - most of them were not actually designed to tolerate being left running forever. They’ve got small “state tables” that keep track of open connections and which PC initiated the connection. The snag is that if you click on a dead link, the router opens a connection to the website, and holds it open indefinitely (believe it’s in the neighborhood of three days) in the table as it’s waiting for a response from the dead website. Hit enough bad links, and you can fill the table.
Only cure is to power-cycle the beast. I plugged my DSL bridge and broadband router into a digital lamp timer that cuts the power at 3:00 AM and turns it back on at 3:01 AM every day to automate the process.
My cell phone! If I miss a call, it will show a window that says “X missed calls”. Fine. But if I hit a button to activate the backlight, it exits that screen. Then I go through 5 keystrokes to see the missed call. But then every time my phone idles and turns the backlight back off, I have to deal with it again, even though I checked the missed calls already! Ugh.