I have a friend who has been missing for the past two days. Normally her phone has a voicemail message that picks up after four rings or so, unless the phone is turned off, in which case the calls go directly to that voicemail.
Now, however, her phone is giving a different message without a voicemail option and this message will pick up anywhere after 1-3 rings; but it does ring. The message is a computer-generated voice saying that “the person you are trying to reach is unavailable”, and it says some indiscernable number/letter combination, and says to try the call again later. Then the call is ended.
This is rather disconcerting obviously. What might explain such a change in call-greetings? Because it would seem that the phone is still on, otherwise it wouldn’t ring at all; but it isn’t going to a voicemail. And it only rings never more than three times, usually only twice. Would any sort of damage to the phone possibly cause this? Cause it to stop working but continue to ring on the end of someone calling it?
Are you sure her number hasn’t been changed? Or her service hasn’t been disconnected from late payments or lack of payments all together? Seems like a pretty normal example of such things.
We have a stand-alone digital answering machine. It records our greeting, but after even a very short power outage (ETA: like 1/2 a second), it loses the time and outgoing message, and defaults to a pre-installed message.
Is this “missing” like “We’re not sure what she’s up to” or “missing” like “She hasn’t shown up for work for two days and none of her friends or family know where she is and we had better call the police”? That is, this might be more than a voicemail issue.
No, you see what she had previously was the pre-installed message for her voicemail. It was the standard computer voice saying, “You have reached…and it repeats the number; please leave your message after the beep.” She never personalized it with her own greeting.
The latter. And yes, it is much more than a voicemail issue. However, I am trying to figure out whatever I can as to what happened. Her mother has already notified police as of earlier today, but the fact that her phone has had this change is strange and I just wanted to see if anyone knew of a reason why it may have happened.
I’ve come across that exact message twice. Both times were because the owner of the phone ran out of minutes on prepaid phones. So it’s not a disconnected number, but the phone carrier won’t allow voicemail until more time is paid for. No idea if that’s the case here, just an example of when I’ve come across it.