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if you work at a phone company you find out that a lot of businesses would really like to use voicemail as permanent long term storage for some unfathomable reason
you'd be shocked how many businesses are not satisfied with a 60 message limit for a voicemail box. can you imagine that? i'd say it's a rare voicemail that's under a minute, so that's a solid hour of "heeey this is johhnnn, returning your callll, "
had a business once that really wanted an *exceptional* mailbox size/longevity. asked them why. found out they were a computerless business and were literally using the voicemail as their order inbox.
that is to say: instead of pressing "voicemail", listening to each message and writing them down, they were QUEUING ORDERS IN THE BOX. they would listen to one order, then process it, then listen to the next.
so if there were 15 orders, and it takes 4 hours to process each one, they needed that 15th message to be in the voicemail box 8 days later when they finally let it play so they could handle that order
and i just... wanted to tell them "you understand that voicemail is, like, an ephemeral thing? it's like a last-ditch attempt to get a hold of you, it's not intended to be a durable system of record"
i think i heard the employees there were all older people so like, maybe they were used to cassette answering machines. maybe they just transitioned off of one, i mean hell that would sure explain their expectations.
and i mean that's the beef right, the problem was *solely* that we sold them cloud voip, which almost nobody really wants. if they had a PBX, it could just keep filling up its hard drive with voicemail forever. thousands and thousands of voicemails.
cloud voip gets you some minimal advantages over a local device with a support contract and otherwise it's all limitations, *such as*, you're sharing an incredibly crusty voicemail system with 180,000 other people
