Voicemail

Couldn't get to your voice mail at home or work Wednesday or Thursday -- or leave a message on some phones? Neither could any other California customers with voice mail on their Verizon Communications Inc. land lines. A database error in a central server in Ontario froze the software for all 740,000 land-line customers subscribing to Verizon's voice mail early Wednesday, and the state's second-largest telephone company couldn't say late Thursday when the problem would be fixed.

Voicemail can cost you. Just ask K.C. Hatcher, a San Francisco-based graphic artist. AT&T wants her to pay $12,000 in long-distance charges rung up by a hacker who apparently changed Hatcher's voicemail message to accept third-party billed calls to Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. "I am totally obsessing about this," said Hatcher, whose normal long-distance bill runs $35 a month. "I'm getting married in June. I want to buy a house, and I'm worried that this fraud is going to ruin my credit."

"The Message in Voicemail" (editorial, April 14) clearly describes the love-hate relationship most of us have with voicemail systems. It is unfortunate that the extraordinary technology Gordon Matthews created has become the subject of public ridicule. It's not the technology itself that causes people to consistently describe voicemail with the same negative adjectives you so appropriately used. The problem inevitably is with its implementation, which seldom is undertaken with the callers' needs in mind.

The first signs of trouble at National Regulatory Services, a small consulting firm in Connecticut, were a series of odd complaints from customers that their phone messages were not being returned--the electronic equivalent of a slap in the face. Sales agents at the company were stumped by the complaints since they could never remember receiving the phone messages in the first place.

A grand jury investigating whether Chiquita banana company voicemail was stolen for a newspaper expose has indicted a former Chiquita lawyer on charges of stealing voicemail messages. George Ventura, the company's former legal counsel in Honduras, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of unlawful interception of communications and five counts of unauthorized access to computer systems. If convicted, he could face up to 12 1/2 years in prison.

A fired newspaper reporter pleaded guilty Thursday to intercepting voice mail from the Chiquita banana company for a series of stories in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Three months ago, the newspaper fired the reporter, Michael Gallagher, renounced the series, apologized to Chiquita on the front page and paid the fruit exporter $10 million. Gallagher, 40, could get up to 2 1/2 years in prison and a $7,500 fine at sentencing March 19.

Homeless people living in shelters across the United States will have access to voicemail boxes under a program developed by a cellular service provider to enable prospective employers, landlords and caseworkers to contact them. "Having to give a shelter number to a prospective employer or landlord as a point of contact can hurt the person's chance of improving his or her living conditions," Chicago-based U.S. Cellular Corp. said.

Irvine-based Blue Diamond Software is launching a service that gives users free voicemail in exchange for listening to ads when they access the service. The company said its EchoBuzz service will be available in Los Angeles and Orange counties in April. The service targets people 12 to 24 years old who do not have their own phones. Users may pre-register for a voicemail box by logging onto the service's Web site.

The sole provider of a nationwide voice paging service called Pocketalk will abruptly cease operations Friday, leaving as many as 80,000 subscribers without service and rendering their special Motorola paging units useless. The service provider, privately owned Conxus Communications Inc., gave customers just four days' notice of the shutdown. The bad news was sent to each subscriber on Monday via voice pager messages. Conxus, based in Greenville, S.C.