Voicemail Notification (Verizon) Won't Clear

Hey All -- On Friday I had a call that went to VM and left a message, which I eventually went in and listed to the "old-fashioned" way apparently (clicked on the VM notification which CALLS the VM box to actually LISTEN to the message)......but once I deleted the message, the VM notification has persisted. I've tried looking through the forums in old threads for some suggestions and none of those seem to work. I've tried adjusting my cellular network settings, I've cleared data from the Phone app in settings, I've even attempted one option of leaving myself a new voicemail and deleting that one and it still won't clear the notification. I have 4 saved messages from my daughter that I've been saving for YEARS now, and this has never been an issue.

Yesterday I finally stopped into a VZW store to ask the question and the response from the associate was basically as follows:

"Oh, that's because we're trying to push people over to the visual voicemail service, so it's something they've changed recently. So if you just start using the visual voicemail app it will clear it."

I'm no genius, but this sounds like a load of crap that's just trying to get me to subscribe to more junk services from them (because oh BTW....it's $2.99/month to have visual voicemail).

Has anyone else experienced this issue at all and been able to figure out how to clear the voicemail notification?

:confused::confused: