i'm very sorry, but...

A message to those who know my phone number:

For the time being, please don't leave any voicemails. I'm still unable to retrieve them, and a visit to the local AT&T store was unhelpful. My BlackBerry was passed around among several employees; they tried to figure out how to restore voicemail functionality, but no one knew the procedure for BlackBerrys (or is "BlackBerries" the proper plural?), and calling AT&T customer service from the store-- something I had to do in Portland-- was fruitless without the final four digits of my father's social security number (I've got it noted somewhere, but I don't tote it around with me and had hoped I wouldn't need it during this visit).

The staff's failure to figure out the voicemail setup confirmed that I hadn't been hallucinating: I'd managed to set everything up correctly on my first BlackBerry, but the procedure was somehow different for the second phone, and the new software's "Help" section was useless.

Upshot: restoring voicemail is going to take a while. The procedure I'm going to have to follow will, according to the staff, erase the six voicemails currently in storage. It's also going to take a while to do, so in the meantime, please email or text me. Gracias.


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