Answering Machine Help (in Off-topic)

So here is the situation. We have an old rotary phone in the basement of our house connected to an answering machine. Upstairs we have another phone (all on the same line). The phone upstairs recently went out so we got a new one that has an answering machine built into it. When we receive calls the old answering machine picks it up but the new one does not. I was wondering if there was some way to incorporate both machines into one or would I be forced to use one or another.

in what situation would having two answering machines be useful or necessary?

So we don't have to walk upstairs or downstairs to check the messages :D (aka laziness)

Since they use different mechanism to record, I know of no way.

yeah, they work by answering after a certain amount of rings so one will always answer before the other one. if they are set to the same amount of rings, then whichever one picks up first will win.

if the new phone you bought is cordless and also has the option of adding satellite phones to the system then you can check the messages from any of those satellite phones usually. that would be about the only way that i know of.

Ya the new one is cordless. too bad it won't work the way I want it to though. Either way thanks guys!

Hook up your answering machine to a cheap linux box, put a script in the crontab to pull the messages from the answering machine, run them through a voice-to-text program and email them to you ;).