My agency uses the services of an offsite technical editor. We are supposed to send documents to this person by fax, and they get faxed back.
I received an email from a supervisor reminding me to NOT send document s to the tech editor before 10:00 AM.
Uh…what?
Look, I understand working hours and non-working hours. I also suspect this person is working from home. Lord knows I don’t want to make someone jump up and answer me on their personal time.
But this person is also a professional with a fax machine. The fax machine is the epitome of “you don’t have to be there” technology. At any hour of the day or night, in theory, a fax could come in and it would just print out to the output tray and sit there quietly, waiting for working hours to begin. Provided the fax is set up with paper during working hours, and given that we don’t send all that much volume, it should be fine to run during off-peak hours. If this person is indeed working from home, the ringer can be turned down, or off, on the fax.
So to sum up, I don’t understand why waiting until 10:00 in the morning is important enough to be worth a reminder. Especially since I’ve never faxed a document to this person before 10:00 AM anyway.
Two points I’d like to emphasize about the email itself: firstly, the reminder was sent directly to me and no one else. Yeah, like it was aimed at me. Despite the fact that I’ve never sent a fax to this person outside of her established working hours. Secondly: the email reminder appeared in my in-box overnight. It was sent to me after MY established working hours.
First, emails don’t ring unless you’re a lunatic. Faxes often make the fax machine emit all manner of ungodly noises, which can be highly distracting especially if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of life/work balance when working at home (your supposition, not mine).
Second, you don’t know you were the only person to get that email. The Bcc: (Bind carbon copy) header allows you to send the same mail to any number of people without alerting any of them to the existence of the others. (Or they could have just sent out multiple individual messages. Their choice.)
That’s kind of weird. The only thing that I can think of is that she lives in a small place and that the fax makes a shitload of noise when something comes in. My old fax machine was like that so we kept it disconnected until needed.
Why are you sending docs to a technical editor by fax anyhow? Can’t they be scanned and sent as pdfs?
People still use fax machines? What third world country are we talking about? Maybe their gods would be disturbed by the fax machine? Maybe they are so poor that the fax machine IS the god to whom they pray before 10 AM. Then they take it from the altar to the communal electrical outlet in the bazar.
Our emails pop up a notification, although they don’t ring. I understand that the fax machine makes noises – although you’d think a modern professional would have as quiet a fax machine as possible.
If email is so darn quieter, why aren’t we emailing documents? It may be job security, but it seems silly for the tech editor to make hand markups that are then faithfully retyped after it’s faxed back, when the document could just be directly edited in a word processor.
Amen to that. I had to fax over proof of prior insurance to my new car insurance company. Yes, fax.
I opted to fax from work, thinking that someone in the building would have a fax machine. Turns out we do have a fax machine–it’s just three floors below me in a department I’ve never visited. I spent half an hour searching for one before just sending out an email asking if anyone knew where one was. Took six hours before anyone replied.
That would drive me nuts, but I guess it works for you.
‘Professional’ means doing the bare minimum (minimizing costs) while getting the most benefit (maximizing profits). Quieter fax machines cost money and it’s cheaper to tell people not to fax while you’re still in personal time.
This is a good question and I’m sure there is no good answer. Feel thankful wooden tables aren’t involved at some point.
I thought of this, but what kind of businessman would give up his phone to gain a fax line? It’s possible he relies on his cell phone for all business calls but would he risk missing a personal call because his only land line was being used for faxes? It doesn’t quite add up no matter how I look at it.
Maybe the UK, or Switzerland. I had serious problems convincing previous employees of mine in those locations that “if I scan it and email it, it will be more readable, equally legal and reach you, oh… about one week before, as I don’t normally have access to a fax machine and I do have a sccanner.”
They were IT companies :smack:
There’s programs that let you receive faxes as pdf, by the way. Very nice invention, if you ask me!
As an aside: I pit songs that sound like the telephone is ringing in the background: no, not the ones that have a beep in the foreground that you can get used to, but the ones whose keyboard at a very low volume makes a beep like an electronic device you can barely hear.
The only one I can think of at the moment is Green Man (Things Have Changed) by Panic at the Disco, but there are others…
This is nuts! Prior to putting anything into a layout, we email a word document to the proofreader, who then edits (and tracks changes and inserts comments to explain as needed ). It’s so very much faster and more accurate.
Ten years ago we did it the way you are now. It would be completely unacceptable now. I’d start shopping for a new tech editor.
While sending documents via email would be wise, it is a good idea to print them out. I’ve been an editor and you’d wouldn’t believe the sheer number of mistakes you catch in print verus on a computer screen.
I work for a law firm, and am fighting the drive toward email only. Why? Because it effectively takes the time the sender would use to physically send the fax (either on a fax tray or an eFax system) and transfers it the the end user.
In my office, I could sit at my desk while the clerk brings me a fax, or I could be checking my email constantly, opening all sorts of documents that may or may not be in the correct format, and printing them out anyway.
There are also people who go down the line of “It’s always worked so why should I change”
There’s also the possibility that the area the fax comes into is not private (kids around or something) till the time stated so he doesn’t want possible sensitive data left on the machine before a specific time when he knows the room is free.
*I’ve met many people who while incredibly talented in a specific area they were morons outside of it.
We use Rightfax which integrates into Exchange so you can send and recieve faxes from your outlook. The faxes come into your mail as .tiff attachments.
Perhaps the person on the other end of the fax line has a boatload of edited copies that he’s supposed to fax out first thing in the morning, and the window assigned for this purpose is, say, 9-10 a.m., and his fax machine can’t send and receive at the same time.
AKA Somebody is making up a schedule just for the sake of making up a schedule so don’t MESS WITH THE SYSTEM. Quite likely, this is somebody who neither sends, receives, processes, or has anything at all to do with the faxes.
