This is giving me such a headache and I'm hoping someone has a solution! My mom has early Alzheimer's. She has a landline with a message machine (AT&T cordless handset). If she does not answer the phone, calls go to the phone's message machine and a message can be recorded. If she is on the phone or phone is off the hook, her calls go to Verizon home voice mail. A broken dial tone alerts her (in theory) that she needs to call a certain number to retrieve her messages. DH & I have the identical setup.
The problem is that I've been unable to teach her how to retrieve those Verizon VM messages. I wrote up a step-by-step cheat sheet and we practiced, but she just didn't get it. (She can retrieve messages from her machine with no problem). I contacted Verizon and had them deactivate her Verizon VM, since I was concerned that she was getting messages and not retrieving them.
So now the real problem seems to be that if someone calls when she is on the phone, the caller gets a message asking them to enter a code if they have a mailbox on the system. That is of course causing confusion and frustration.
Any suggestions on how to make this better?