Verizon Wireless: Polite but Clueless

My new Treo 650 from Verizon has been a nifty, nice gadget, except for one really annoying issue: there it always displays a voicemail waiting icon, and the device’s voicemail menu always shows one message waiting, regardless if I’ve gotten a second or third message.  This sucks because I can’t tell if I’ve ever got new voicemail without dialing up and checking my mail — and that costs me minutes from my allocation and is a pain in the butt. 

I’ve now spent nearly four hours on the phone trying to get the problem resolved and haven’t gotten anywhere.  The worst part of my experience with Verizon’s various tech support folks is the rediculous amounts of time I have to spend on hold while the current tech rep either looks up information which should have already been on their screen, or waiting to transfer to another department who will inevitably put me on hold again while they look up the same stupid crap the first department was looking up.

Verizon’s staff is, without fail, very polite and calm — but completely clueless as to how they can fix my problem.  I spend far too much time on hold with nice folks who repeat the same exact steps as the person before.  Verizon’s support system also seems incapable of carrying one ticket between various departments through an entire incident.  I’ve had at least four separate tickets filed on this one incident.  This is horses#it as far as I’m concerned.

I’m near the point where I’d just like my damned first phone (a four year old Motorola v60 with few capabilities) back.