Voice Mail: Callers Lost In a Brave New World

Remember the days when many callers complained about telephone answering machines? They were so impersonal, so cold.

Welcome to the brave new world of Harvard voice mail, a land so complex that many subscribers are getting a little nostalgic for their answering machines.

"By the time I press a number to enter a mailbox and then another to leave a message and then listen to another menu asking me if I want to review or erase my message, I'd rather go back to the good old days of regular answering machines," said Mather House resident Tricia L. Huang '92.

Harvard's voice mail system, only in its first week of operation, has left several subscribers frustrated and confused about the process for sending and accessing personal telephone messages.

Some students who have used the new feature said that they were unable to leave messages because some students' voice mailboxes are already full, and others cite the multistep accessing procedure as too time consuming.

Nancy M. Kinchla, who is coordinating the transition between the old Centrex system and the new Harvard University Network, said that more than 1000 students have opted for the four-dollar-a-month voice mail feature. The large demand has caused some temporary difficulties, she said.

"Early Monday morning we had to change the main disk for the mailbox message itself because instead of playing the recording for 15 people, the system was forced to accommodate 150," Kinchla said. "Now we're trying to work out some incompatibility problems with the new disk."

However, Kinchla maintains that several voice mailboxes are becoming overloaded because subscribers who have not yet learned to access the system have allowed messages to accumulate for the past several days.

"One mailbox can hold up to 12 one-minute messages, but they can add up fast," Kinchla said, "and if students don't initialize their mailboxes so they can access their messages, incoming callers will hear a message that the mailbox is full."

She said subscribers should call the phone office to find out their temporary password as soon as possible so that the old messages can be cleared from the system. If students do not retrieve their messages within a five day period, the voice mail system will automatically delete them.