Your custom voicemail prompts are useless because after the prompt, you get another prompt from the system asking you to leave a message after the beep.
I read confirmation somewhere that the origin of this idiotic practice, including the absurdly verbose script they use[1], was to waste people's airtime. And it sure seemed to be true, because some carriers literally went to the trouble, even as late as the 2010s, to modify their voicemail systems to remove the option that used to be there to omit the boilerplate language. Plus, if you had any goal besides wasting people's time, why would you coin the phrase "an automated voice messaging system"?
I wish they'd reverse course now, though, since almost zero subscribers of any of these big carriers have limited talk minutes.
[1] I believe this is the full exact text that Verizon and AT&T used, verbatim from memory. "Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Four... One... Five... Five... Five... Five... Zero... One... Seven... Four... is not available. At the tone, please leave your message. When you are finished recording, hang up, or, press one for more options. To leave a callback number, press seven."
I wonder if this is what actually killed voicemail. Who was going to wait through all that crap to say "Hey it's Steve, wanted to talk to you about X, call me back."
The old trick back in the day was "one-star-pound" - one of the three would often skip the recording and dump you right to the beep based on what carrier's VMB it was.
