Message Mess

First, my MacBook M1 and iPhone 12 (brand new) aren't in synch. Additionally, some of my messages disappeared only from my iPhone when I set it up from the cloud. When I replaced my iPhone, the tech at the Apple Store advised me to go ahead and leave after I'd been there already two hours downloading from the cloud, but that advice apparently caused a glitch as messages were populating. One friend's messages skipped a ten-month chunk, from the day I got the phone in November back to January--that is, I'm only missing every text from January 2022 until November 2022; all the messages from 2021, 2020, etc are there. Weird, huh? I made a Genius appt. and they tried synching with my laptop, which didn't work, though they clicked through everything else possible--nothing worked. So now they're telling me to delete the phone and start over, from home, plugged in and connected to wifi, without going out for however long it takes for everything to download from the cloud. One of the techs said that could mean for 3 days...

Meanwhile, my MacBook Air M1 has a single unread message doc notification, but I cannot find the freaking message.