No Voicemail?!?

The first week I arrived in India I noticed two things:

1. My India cell phone wasn't set-up for voicemail. When I asked to have voicemail set-up on my phone, I got a vague response about it not being ....
2. People almost always answer the phone -- even when they are in meetings (sometimes people will stay in the room and whisper into their phone, other times they leave the room to take the call)

After talking to one of my ex-pat co-workers in China -- found that it's the same way there.

The best that I can figure out from googling about it and asking a couple of people -- a lot of people in India never had a land-line phone -- they went from no phone straight to cell phone. And when you think about it -- voicemail is just an advanced version of an answering machine, and answering machines were invented because you couldn't take your land-line phone with you.

Of course in today's world you can get by without voicemail -- you just send a text instead.

No voicemail does take some getting used to though --- and it doesn't help if you are like me, forever leaving my phone at my desk.