My cell phone service provides me with a voice mail box. Generally speaking this is a useful way to avoid missing messages. Since I usually carry my cell phone with me during my waking hours I don't often miss calls in the first place unless I have it turned off (as in church or during a performance) or I wind up somewhere without a strong signal. Still, I do occasionally miss calls and get messages.

A week ago I had turned off my phone during church, as usual. Afterwards my wife and I took my son to the play in which he is currently performing. While waiting for the play to begin (clearly, since he is one of the actors he had to be there early), I remembered my phone and turned it back on. It was then I realized that I had a message. So I called up the message center to pick it up.

When I got logged in the first message it played was from my daughter. This was nothing new. In fact it was a message from my birthday back in October. She had had a busy day at college and had not been able to call me until late that evening. I don't remember why I missed getting the call, but ever since then I have repeatedly saved that message each time I check voice mail because it was always uplifting to hear her sign off with "I love you." I could listen to my daughter telling me she loved me whenever I wanted to. This was not something that was surprising to hear or that I needed reminding of. However, I found it very pleasant to listen to, and since the voice mail system gave me an option to save it, I always did.

However, this day it did not give me an option to save it! The only I options I was given were to delete it or replay it. First I replayed it just to make sure that I hadn't misheard my control options ("I love you"). Then I tried punching what I thought was the option from the last time I had saved it only to hear "You have entered an incorrect command, please try again." After trying other options (being careful to avoid deleting it) and being told that each one was incorrect I was told "We are sorry you are having trouble, please try again later" and it hung up. I called back up and logged in again ("I love you") and I tried other options, all to no avail. I tried replaying it ("I love you") and then not entering anything, but it considered that incorrect as well. I couldn't get past this old message in order to hear my new message without deleting the old one.

Finally, I decided that there was nothing that I could do but delete it. This really shouldn't matter, it was an old message and didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but I still wish I had another option. So, I replayed it one last time ("I love you") and then deleted it. This took me to the new message. That new message was fairly routine, but I couldn't have known that without listening to it, and now I'd done that. I deleted the new message.

It has been a week now, and I find myself thinking about that message. I'm not sure why I had been able to save it before but now I couldn't. Maybe it had reached some age threshold. I can understand why the phone company wants to discourage people from keeping lots of messages on file. I work with voice recordings and realize that even a few seconds can take several kilobytes to store as data. If people kept lots of messages in their voice mailboxes it would impose a huge load on the phone system's voice storage system.

But this was just one message.

And now it's gone.

Jessica, I still miss your message.