Our cordless phone/answering machine went weird on us about a week ago. You would pick it up and it would just beep three times when trying to use the handset. I checked the owner’s manual and all that was mentioned was two beeps and that meant you were too far away from the base, which wasn’t the case, unless 2 inches is too far away. One thing the owner’s manual said was if it wasn’t working at all was to reinitialize the handset to the base. This procedure involved unplugging the battery in the handset and unplugging the power supply to the base for 5 minutes. That worked once – the very first time I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. Hung up and tried again right away and three beeps were it. Bought a new battery for the handset and charged it overnight. It too worked once and then beeps. While in Target this afternoon we figured we should go ahead and replace the phone, the answering machine portion still worked, but we really use the cordless phone too.
Picked up this snazzy looking 2.4Ghz phone for only $55. Got it home took it out of the box and plugged it all up. Broke out the manual for it to see how to set up the answering machine portion and couldn’t find any mention of it in the papers. Read them again slower, still nothing about answering machine. That’s when I looked over the box and it didn’t say anything about an answerer. The picture sure looked like it would be an answering machine, but looks can be deceiving, it was a speaker phone, That is why it had a speaker in the base. Doh! Boxed it back up as best I could and back to Target we went. This time I made sure it said Answering Machine on all 6 sides of the box. Different company and different looks, but $5 cheaper. Got to find a neat recording to put on there, guess I’ll go Googling for a wav file.