Still Prefer Answering Machine to Voicemail

While on the subject of voicemail...I've avoided home voice mail for years. In part because I don't like the idea of paying a monthly fee. But also because I doubted that its useability would be as good as a dedicated machine. Well, I have recently had the chance to confirm that belief.

A few months ago we upgraded our phone service not so much because we wanted voice mail, or digital phone, or anything else, but because it was part of Comcast's three-fer $99 deal. So we got voice mail, but I immediately disabled it, prefering to stick with the answering machine.

Then the answering machine died (possibly due to that cat kicking it off the table), and in the interim, I decided to activate voice mail. I don't like it much, for three reasons. One, it is not as obvious as the flashing light on the answering machine (probably solveable with a more expensive, integrated handset). Two, it is much less convenient to access, compared to the "one-click" access for the answering machine. Three, we only get 1 mailbox, AFAIK, versus the 4 on the answering machine. Seeing as Beth gets 10x the messages I do, once we moved to the multi-mailbox answering machine, there was no going back to a shared mailbox for me.

All these objections are solveable, and probably have been solved in some implementations, but until they are there for me, ready for the taking, I'm sticking to the digital answering machine.