I tried calling AT&T once and that Tech was not even sure what I was talking about. Am going to try again later…

So, armed with this blog, I called back again, got a different rep, and he opened a ticket in five minutes. (We’ll see in a few days whether it actually worked, of course…)

Thanks all for the info and support.

TSG

Then I see this story floating around

AppleInsider is reporting that AT&T and Apple are discussing new features that could arrive exclusively on the iPhone “before year’s end.”
“other exclusive features will reportedly come in the form of a new voicemail setting that will allow users to disable the custom voicemail greeting and the AT&T voicemail introduction heard by other users. The feature, presumably to be pitched as a time saver, will also allow users to automatically bypass all greetings and instructions when placing calls to other AT&T customers.”

NOW just how is this going to work? This voice mail platform stuff is really deep ya think? Would some please explain what’s next?

This is ridiculous people!
September 2 2009

asked my tech specifically what the technical name of change that was made to my account, and it is “set the caller prompt field to ‘none’”.

John Lynch real nice guy said there is NO such field.

It’s still open ticket with the engineers.

This is crazy, What is really going on? So I still wait. They said they would or could or consider releasing me from my contact so I could go to Sprint Palm Pre with NO LADY.. I don’t really want to but Guess I will when we get to that bridge

Thanks Alan

BTW- The techs a reading this at ATT.
“Just fix it”

So lessons from all this are (1) the people who talk to you on the phone are NOT the people who can actually make the change, so don’t get too upset with them if they pass along incorrect information – it’s what they are being told, (2) the people who have the power to actually make the change don’t all seem to agree on whether it is possible to make the change, (3) it is quite definitely possible to eliminate the VM instructions for an iPhone 3GS – I’m 2 for 2!

If any of you have been stuck at the “sorry we can’t make the change” message from tech support, try again. Try using the lingo from my previous post (e.g. “set caller prompt field to NONE”) to help communicate exactly what you want. If you get really stuck and repeatedly fail to get tech support to find back-end engineers willing and able to make the change, leave a comment for me in this forum and I’ll send you my case number so you can reference it as an example of a AT&T successfully executing this request.

FYI this tech repeated the comment that my other tech had made yesterday – AT&T is getting a lot of these requests lately. He was also the first among the techs with whom I have spoken aware of the NYT column.

Rob Tatu Ruggeri, it sounds like you had a _much_ worse experience than me – very frustrating! In case it helps, I asked my tech specifically what the technical name of change that was made to my account, and it is “set the caller prompt field to ‘none’”. I also asked what was the most direct route to making this request, and she said (1) call AT&T customer service, (2) explain the issue and ask for AT&T technical support (not Apple), (3) explain the issue to tech support and request the that they “set the caller prompt field to ‘none’”, and then (4) they will open a ticket to have the VM team make the change. I was actually quite impressed with the prompt service I got from everyone I spoke with at AT&T.

Incidentally I have asked all of the techs I talked to if they were familiar with David Pogue’s NYT column about this issue, and none of them were, but they all seemed interested. The last tech also noted that there were a lot of requests for the same change in the past few days, so perhaps this thing is getting some momentum within AT&T.