Thank Goodness For Faxing
As a software guy it amazes me that fax machines still exist.
Any time I have to use one I feel like I’m traveling back in time to
the days of telegraph and teletype.
My favorite thing about faxing is the cover sheets. Most have
eight to ten fields you have to fill in, by hand, before you’re even
allowed to stick your document into the paper eater. Many of
these fields haunt me. Like, are you supposed to count the
cover page when filling in the “Pages:” field? While I’m sure
this question has been tackled in numerous doctoral dissertations, I
haven’t read them, so I usually just jot down “6” and follow it
with “(+/– 1)”.
The best thing about fax cover sheets are the little
checkboxes. For example, our sheets at work have these boxes on
them:
- Urgent
- For Review
- Please Reply
- Please Comment
- Please Recycle
Now tell me, which of these WOULDN'T I check?
Urgent: Look pal, if it wasn't urgent, I would have mailed you
the original document. Here's a tip: If you see a document from
me coming out of the fax machine at your desk instead of the
mailbox at the end of your gravel driveway, go ahead and read it
now. I chose the instant-yet-horribly-muddy copy for a reason.
For Review: If you don't mind, go ahead and read this document. Okay?? Thanks!
Please Reply: I suppose one should leave this
un-checked if they prefer dialing numbers, hearing beeps, watching
their urgently-needed document get scanned and processed, then never, ever hearing back from anybody about it.
Please Comment: In light of the previous checkbox,
could we re-title this box to read "Please mutter to yourself"? I
mean, does anyone ever check “Please Comment” but not “Please
Reply”? What would that mean??? (Hal?)
Please Recycle: Now, I have to admit, I never check
this one, but that’s just because I’m a tree-hating bastard. The
last thing I want is for someone to go throwing my fax into a recycle
bin just to spare some sappy, useless tree his life. I mean, if I
wanted to save trees I would have used e-mail or postal mail. If
you have a fax machine then you should understand by now that the whole
idea behind faxing is to waste as much paper as possible. Why
else would they make the machines such that they “accidentally” suck in
one-and-a-half pages all the time, forcing us to send the same document
six times? And, even if I was a tree-hugger, as a liberal I could
never tell you what to do with your life. So really, how does
this box ever get checked?
It seems to me we could save the cover sheet filler-outer some
effort here and just combine all these into one checkbox. The box
would read: “Hi there, whoever gets this. Hope this unreadable
and utterly-useless-for-legal-purposes document finds you well.
Please don’t interrupt your tasks today with this document — it’s just
something I wanted to pass along for your pleasure. In fact, I
would highly recommend that you don’t read it, or, if you do, please
don’t talk about it, especially to me. And when you’re done with
the dozens of pieces of paper that your machine spit out as a result of
my repeated attempts to send this document in full, if you wouldn’t
mind, could you throw them into a bin that is headed for either a
landfill or one of those Entropy At The Speed Of Flame
incinerators? Thanks!”
See? Then you’d only have one box to check.