Dear Huge Conglomerate,
Take it up the arse with a crumpled faxing cover sheet (page one of two).
You’ve emailed me a form to fill it. You’re really clever using email and that but it’s a PDF and you’d like me to print it out and fax it back to you. It’s a simple form Name… Address… etc. I’ve created a word document especially for you and I’m retyping your stuff and filling in the info. I’m going to attach this to my reply - I’m willing to go as far as this to satisfy your attachment fetish but I’m not fucking faxing it to you, you faxshredding papercut. Have you heard of copy & paste? You have three choices, I’ll attach it to an email, ring it on a fucking homing pigeon - or I’ll scribe it on parchment and ship it over.
Feel free to fax me three times quickly and not get through. Call and tell me you’re not getting through - although I ask you very nicely to stop trying for now - or send an email, please ignore my request and continue a further couple of times. Mr. Big Client has all day to watch me playing fax-tag with your tree-munching arse. Call me again to make sure I got the fax. Yes I did - but you didn’t ask me if it was legible - and it’s not mwahahahaha. I know it’s your month end statement that I’ll shortly receive by mail. Will you take pieces of eight as payment?
My company has to deal with mortgage companies all the time. Mortgage companies do not like money leaving their accounts, even if it isn’t theirs to begin with. They will hold onto it forever and a day, and use stalling tactics to keep on earning that interest off of other people’s money.
A classic tactic is
“Oh, we didn’t receive your fax” Call back in three days, we might receive it by then."
Or, “I can’t talk to you because you haven’t faxed the authorization form.”
No, I can’t let you talk to the fax department to see if they’ve received the form, you don’t have authorization.
No, I can’t talk to the fax department, they haven’t notified me that they’ve received authorization yet.
Call back in three days, they should have it by then."
This is maddening, to put it mildly.
Our solution?
Take three authorization forms. Tape them together in a loop. (Let the first one go through, tape to the third one.)
Fax.
Fax endlessly.
Fax infinitely.
Fax 'til the cows come home.
Let that little looped fax just go and go.
Magically, they tend to receive those faxes much more promptly than ordinary faxes. Who would have thought?
I hate this at work, mostly because for most of the calls I get about FAXes I can’t even check to see if we got them. The rest of them I can sorta check, but I can’t process them.
I’ve started telling people to just mail them in. Inevitably they’re using a machine so gummed up that we can’t even read their message, or their identification is either too light or too dark or they missed a page and any of these, ANY of these, will make their FAX unacceptable and they have to send the whole stinking thing in again. While that seems mean, I understand the purpose of it: saving half a dozen odd bits of paper and putting them all together is ridiculous considering our call and FAX volume.
But snail mail is your friend if they won’t let you send things electronically. You know it’s legible when you send it, and if you spring the extra few cents for registered mail you know exactly when it got there and who signed for it. No excuses anymore.
The worst is when businesses assume that you have access to a fax–I honestly don’t know if they think most people own one, or that most people work at a place where they can access one, but I fit neither category, and I suspect that’s true for a lot of people.
Seriously. If the form requires a signature, and this is any kind of transaction more important than deciding who’s on your fantasy football team this year. . .no, putting it in a Word document is not sufficient. Because, seven years from now, when you or your heirs or your dog or whatever are disputing this transaction, and saying, “I never asked for this!”, we need to be able to show you a copy of your signature. We can’t do that if it’s 12-point Times New Roman.
I work for a company that does this (which is a financial services company), and, while we’re willing to accept forms that are filled out, scanned, and emailed as an attachment, anything like what you’re doing wouldn’t be acceptable. If you don’t have access to a fax machine or a scanner, then you’ll have to mail it. Yes, it’ll take longer to get here. But way back in yon olden days. . .that’s what you had to do anyway. If it is so utterly critical for you to fax something, you can do it from a bajillion different places. Seriously. I can go to my fucking grocery store and fax something. There are ways to fax things if they’re extremely urgent. Yes, you have to pay for them–you decide if that’s worth it to you.
Also, if there is some sort of legal wording specific to the document you’re filling out, then it’s very likely that something where you go in and type it up won’t be accepted. Companies hire people to do their forms so that they’re standardized. Going over individual emails–retyped by some yutz in Yucaipa–to make sure they didn’t leave anything out or misstate anything is a waste of fucking time.
And, yes; they do have to check. Because people–maybe not you, but people in general–will lie about anything, and the company has to cover its ass.
People who take three days to confirm whether they got a fucking fax, however. . .they can rot in the Special Hell. That is pure fucking bullshit.
There’s no reason to continue to rely on a fax for stuff like this. If it requires a signature, there’s no reason why a digital signature won’t suffice. I have clients that route documents where no less than a dozen signatures are required from various department heads scattered in different locations. Using Adobe’s digital signatures within PDFs has shaved WEEKS off the approval process. I’m sure it’s saved a lot of trees to boot.
OTOH, I’ve got clients and vendors that insist on analog signatures. We’re a mostly paperless office, and it’s unbelievable how much paper we’re forced to waste because of other people’s inefficient and wasteful processes. It would be so much easier, cost-effective and environmentally responsible to route signature-required documents as a PDF and have everyone sign digitally.
But some people have managed to convince themselves that a fax is a more “real” method of digital transmission. We’ve had to install eFax on all our machines for these people. A fax comes in, we route it as a PDF and have everyone use eFax’s stamp functionality to put signatures on it. And then we fax it back. At least we can save the paper on our end.
Some insist on mailing documents back and forth. Six copies of a thirty-page document will come in the mail, with “Sign Here” flags all over them. What a huge waste of paper, money and time. A PDF could have been routed digitally and it would cost nothing and be executed within 30 minutes, not 7-10 days.
Companies, governments and other paper-wasters should make every document available in PDF and make them digitally signable. It’s good business, since it makes things more efficient, and it’s better for the environment.
The problem is, until the public at large accepts these as being as legitimate as a good, old-fashioned John Hancock, there’s no incentive for companies to get themselves set up to use them. With internal stuff, there isn’t a problem, but with regular, Joe-and-Mary Smith customers. . .
. . .well, we’re the SDMB, and are 'net-savvy almost by definition. Most people aren’t. Sucks, but there it is.
I used to get spam faxes in work. It drove me bananas, so one day I faxed back several pages. On the first page I drew a huge F, on the second, a huge U, on the third one a big C and so on. I didn’t heard from them again.
Ugh, this is a battle I had to fight a billion times at the brokerage firm I worked at. We would not accept anything but a faxed or mailed copy of most documents. I used to get screamed at because of this policy.
I didn’t initially agree with this policy, but I do now. I have seen some of the most disgusting schemes of people cheating people. Nothing shocks me anymore.
I’m sure as technology develops, there may be alternate ways to verify someone’s identity. But, the most secure way I know is still to compare the signature on file with the signature on the form.
There’s no reason why analog and digital processes can’t be set up in parallel.
Hypothetical example… You’re an auto insurance company. You can save tons of time and paper moving your customers toward digital signatures and digital exchange of paperwork. You keep the old process in place, but you also digitize all your standard forms and let your customers who know how to use that process do so. You might even give them a little incentive in the form of $5 or so off their premiums if they agree to do things digitally. That way you move people gradually over to digital and you attract new customers who appreciate the discount.
No signature required. I quite understand the need for faxing and its convenience - but in this case it’s
Name
Address
Type of Business
Phone Number
Fax Number
Date of Company Formation
and a few more details. Not a legal doc. If it’s legal stuff I’ll fax a copy for expediency and mail the original. I just want to avoid printing when it’s not necessary - and faxing too!
yutz in Yucaipa
I don’t work in auto insurance, though; I work in personal finance. Specifically, I work in a branch of personal finance that has a large contingent (easily 50%+) of customers over the age of sixty-five. Additionally, being financially based, there’s not really any kind of discount or incentive that can be offered.
And changing our forms so that there’s now an additional bit of hoo-doo attached to them? I imagine that’d go over like a lead balloon. shrugs I suppose that, in certain ways, this industry is a lot more conservative than others. But. . .hell, I have to produce copies of a person’s signature on a regular basis–at least once a week.
And, Bam Boo Gut, upon seeing what the form required. . .yeah, that should be acceptable in an e-mail, and it’s fucking stupid that they won’t agree to it. Withdrawn :).
Why thank you Angel of the Lord. In my original draft of the post I had mentioned that it didn’t require a signature but I must have deleted that part in favour of copious expletives!
