Photograph of a Cell Phone with an Inuyasha background?

Why has Google Voice eaten up my original cell number and why does my phone not ring when people call?

• I'll keep it short, but after some drama/grief with Facebook and some severe cyberbullying/stalking...I decided to pull my Facebook off the internet, change my phone number and experiment with trying to use google voice as an easy way to mask my personal cell should anyone ever give me any personal grief ever again. The thing I thought I would like about Google Voice was that it generates a local number that people can call or text, and it goes straight to your cell. And for me and my sanity, I can easily change the Google number to another random local number if people start to abuse that number, and it doesn't affect my personal cell or me having to change it with Sprint. I figured my family and VERY close friends could call me on my real cell, so they wouldn't have to go through all the identification filtering when they call, and my trusted friends could text me on my personal cell line. I found out today how little I knew about Google Voice, and about what it has been doing with my ignorance. I'm on the Sprint Network, btw. For about a day things seemed fine, until I found out today that 9 people had tried to call me and my phone never rang even once. I got their voicemails after the fact, as well as missed call notifications through my gmail. Apparently, my family I gave out my original cell to said when they called it said something like "We're sorry, but we could not complete your call" and it cut them off. They tried to call me on my Google Voice, but some told me it went though the identification process, and it just rang and rang. My family said they tried calling the Google number and all it did was ring and ring like it was going through, then forwarded to my voice mail. I will say that today I was home all day, and after I found all this out, I did a test both on my Dad's cell and the house phone....and it confirmed everyone's problems. I missed out on going out with some friends because I never got the call, my mother tried to call me about something important and got really angry with me that I never got her calls, saying "Why didn't you answer your phone....it rang and rang and rang!!!" Basically I ended up with a lot of frustrated and angry people today because Google Voice has severely messed up and taken over my cell phone. I really want to keep Google Voice, but I also want people to have the ability to call me on my real cell who have it so they don't have to go through the ID filtering process. I really don't want to give up this service, because socially it gives me some security and peace of mind when I say, meet a girl and it doesn't work out....or a guy friend I meet starts to give me poblems...both which have happened....and then I don't have to switch my personal cell and go through the frustrating process of having to give it out to the 50+ people that need to have the real one. I will also say, that because I was home....and because I am with Sprint....I live in an area of town that gets poor cell reception from my provider, and they were nice to give me a Sprint Airrave device, which boosts your signal bars to full and hooks up via a GPS that sticks to the window and connects via your high speed internet to access the cell network. I did not leave the house today, and home is where I am most of the time....so this is a huge problem/concern for me. Is this device in any way keeping/hindering people from connecting to me when I am at home??? I could really use help. I can't receive calls from anyone....texts through Google Voice yes...but no phone calls and my phone is severely messed up. I would have called Sprint but they are closed until tomorrow morning, so there's nothing about it I can do for now. How do I separate my two phone numbers and still have people use Google Voice for those I want to give it out to??? Help severely needed. Thanks!

• Answer:

  If this is short I hate to see the long version. The only feature you should use is have google voice call you cell and if you cell calls your google voice you go straight to voice mail option or press 2 to make a call. do not have any changes to let it take you voice mail on the sprint line or any other features. Test have people call you cell leave a message and it will go to cell voice mail. If you have a smart phone there are apps to handle google voice and you will not use any cell minutes and the caller id will be google voice when you use the app else you call you google voice number then press 2 and make your call the caller id will be google voice.