This has happened to me a couple of times over the last few years from one completely reliable source: a colleague in fact.
Today I never received one from my daughter. She texted me this morning and asked me to bring her something after work to her mum’s place, and I absolutely did not receive the text message.
How common is this?
Seems to me this sort of shit could cause major relationship issues if one person sends a text and gets no response. Or what if you rely on a text message to get picked up in the middle of nowhere at 3:00 AM and the message never arrives?
I’ve never heard of emails just disappearing into the ether…
I’ve had it happen a few times over the years. Unfortunately it always seemed to happen when they came from my wife/ex-wife who tended to go a bit overboard and swear that I was just ignoring her “SEE SEE [showing me her phone] IT SAYS YOU GOT IT!!!1!”. It was nicer back before I had my current phone when I could then show her my phone and say “Look, I don’t have it, here’s the most recent message ‘??’ and the last one was from three days ago”. Now you can delete individual messages without deleting the entire thread so showing her my phone wouldn’t prove anything. With older phones you had to delete all the messages from that person if you really wanted to get rid of a specific one.
So, yeah, there were a few minor arguments because of lost messages. I think there was at least one time when the message showed up an hour later after she had calmed down and I said “Jesus effin Christ take a breath, I told you I didn’t get the message, it’s not like I didn’t buy milk at the store just to piss you off”…on the inside. On the outside I said “Oh hey, I just got the message, that’s strange, I wonder what happened”.
Emails used to get lost in Gmail, but was a long, long time ago. Again, very rarely.
My phone will also sometimes lose emails or voicemails for a while, then all of a sudden I’ll have a shit ton of messages. Hasn’t happened lately, but it’s disconcerting to all of a sudden have 13 voicemail messages out of nowhere.
I run a company, and there was quite a long time where I’d use more than 6,000 minutes a month. Thankfully I have more and better employees now to take some of that burden.
My experience has been that if you’re out of range for more than a few hours, you don’t get texts. They’re not like emails; they don’t wait for you to connect whenever to get them.
Right now, for example, I’m vacationing in a town with no cell service. I don’t expect I’ll get any texts that people may send me. That’s just the way it is. Also didn’t get several I know were sent last summer when I was driving through a remote part of Canada with no cell service.
Definitely. The spouse and daughter are all close and we all have iPhones, and we compare how the conversations look on each phone when we’re together. There are messages missing.
When someone sends you a text that says ‘?’ but they didn’t send you something a half hour earlier that you didn’t respond to or you you get home and your spouse didn’t say ‘um, where’s the milk I asked you to pick up on your way home from work?’.
I’ve not, but it happens to my dad a lot. To be more precise, he gets it a few days later. And while texts aren’t exactly urgent, that’s usually enough time passing to make it pointless.
I’ve had it happen to me a number of times. Usually seems to happen for half a day or so where I will miss a few and a couple of mine just don’t get received. And yes, it’s caused a problem or two in relationships when they thought I was ignoring them.
I sent one to someone earlier this week while they were out at lunch. When he got back I asked why he hadn’t responded. He replied that my message hadn’t arrived. As he stood next to me while I was looking at my phone to make sure I had sent it, it arrived on his phone.
“If you’d been standing there 15 minutes ago I would have just asked you,” I said.
“Reaaly limited range on your service,” he replied.
Happens to me all the time. Mammahomie’s phone is a hunk of junk, and she’s at the ass end of her coverage area most of the time anyway, so I get maybe half of her texts. Not that I’m complaining.
Happens to me too, and I’ve got a pretty new beefy smartphone. If one or both of you is out of network, it can take hours or days to finally show up on your phone.
Anyone that would get super-pissed about this, btw, needs some anger management classes.
It has happened to me a few times, both sending and receiving.
The worst though was when a client left for Mexico in a Monday and needed me to watch his cats. He had a bad habit of calling me from the plane, I don’t what he would have done had I not been available. He left the message on Monday, I didn’t get it until Thursday even though I had gotten other VMs left on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I was close to tears rushing to check on his cats. Fortunately there was about a half inch of water in their bowl and a small amount of food left.
If I don’t get a response to either a text or a VM within a reasonable amount of time I send/call again.
What’s really weird though is when somebody’s VM screws up and starts playing for the caller. I’ve had that happened to me with three different people, using three different carriers, on three different types of phones. I called them and the call went straight to VM and started playing their messages to me, except for the one person who had a password. His VM asked me over and over for the password and wouldn’t let me leave a message.
I’d say overall, they’re pretty reliable, but I’ve had both SMS and MMS turn up missing a number of times, on both ends. Either that, or they can be delayed (very inconvenient) for a few reasons.
For that reason, I prefer services like Hangouts (Android), which are both more powerful and independent of the carrier.
I’ve had it happen a lot. It most frequently happens when people are using weird custom messaging apps (eg Emoji) and sending to someone not using the same app on the same service. Sometimes the messages disappear, sometimes delayed, sometimes batched up and sent all at once hours later.