Some people just love faxes. I don’t get it either. I worked with a few breeders of reptiles who would ONLY send you their availability lists by fax. They all had e-mails, and computers, and telephones, but the fax was The Way Things Were Done. If you didn’t work with them they’d sell to someone else. It was weird. Eventually, I was invited to take a facility tour with one of them and he did business over the phone with me from that point.
Dude, I agree faxes are outdated, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to insult the person’s children…
Exactly. Between the absurd time request and the grossly outdated way of doing the job, your firm might want to reconsider using her.
The time request is extremely unprofessional, especially as there are so many workarounds to whatever issue is causing her to ask. Also, you’re the client. She’s not doing you a favor. You’re paying her. She shouldn’t be asking you to watch the clock like that.
It’s perfectly reasonable for her to define her “working hours,” as in when she’s available to do projects, answer phone calls, etc. As long as her work hours are suitable for your needs, there’s no problem there.
But there is no reason that you shouldn’t be allowed to send her stuff before or after her work hours.
In the unlikely event that there IS some extraordinary reason that you really shouldn’t fax her before 10, then you should be made aware of that–maybe not the details, but just that there is some reason for you being expected to cooperate with such a weird requirement.
A lot of people I have done work with don’t have access to a scanner and email, but can have things faxed. So I get a regular fax number, and they don’t need to know it goes straight to my computer.
Verily?
By the way, every computer with a POTS modem can send and receive faxes. I still include a cheap modem in every computer I build mainly for backup/emergency internet access but also as a phone dialer and for fax. (I also include the modem because I have a crate full of them. They cost nothing nowadays).
The worst part is banks, lawyers and other bureaucrats who insist they need a SIGNATURE and will accept a fax. It was not an hour ago that I got a call from my lawyer asking I send him a signed authorization. (At least he ask I send it by email). He was amazed when, before we ended the conversation, I told him it had already gone out. “What? You already printed it and scanned it?” Yes, it seems people print a document so they can scan it. That the stupidity of this is not obvious to them is quite telling.
Let me tell all those fools something. I am faxing or emailing a document which has a signature which I scanned years ago and which has gone out in dozens of documents. I have a blank document and I type whatever I need and it goes out as PDF or FAX without me ever really having signed it. I can also include my boss’s signature and even Bill Clinton’s if you like. If I have received a signed letter from you I can include your signature as well. The whole “signature” thing is stupid but those bureaucrats will trust that signature like it means something.
I have templates of blank documents with all sorts of headings and signatures, including one with a beautiful Chinese chop I got in Yangshuo some months ago. I love that one.
he, he, that reminds me that at the bank in China the employees use their chops so one day I tried to use mine but they would not let me. No, they wanted a signature, no chop mark. :mad:
Right, that’s how I get my faxes at work. Printing involves hitting “next” a few too many times, but other than that, it’s wonderful. And you don’t have to waste toner/ink on junk faxes.
Years ago I needed to send faxes to my bank in Madrid but they only connected the fax machine during office hours :rolleyes: and their office hours were only in the morning so, given the six hours difference from the East Coast, I was forced to get up in the middle of the night to fax them. And every time I mentioned this to them they thought it was normal to only switch on the fax during office hours.
I am glad they now have a website and I can do most things online without the need to send any phony “signatures”.
Another vote for efax.com. It’s reasonably priced and eliminates the need for a physical fax. If you’re regular joe just looking for a few faxes a month, their service is free!
I used to have an efax number but I didnt like that I needed to install proprietary software to use it so I gave it up because I hardly used it anyway. And that was long time ago, today I have zero need.
One good thing though is that you can have a number in any state you want and you can get your faxes as you travel anywhere in the world. A foreign business could have a US fax number. Ten years ago it made just a bit of sense. Today, with email, it doesn’t.
Here I was, thinking I was the only one who’d figured this trick out.
At my part time job, we have paper timesheets that you must sign before submitting them to The Boss. The kind lady in payroll also emails the entire year’s worth of timesheets at the start of the year, so you can print your own. I was out sick on one of the days we had to turn in timesheets, so I jotted my hours in, attached my signature, and emailed it to my boss.
He called me up about an hour later to remind me that I had to sign the timesheet before submitting it to him. “I did,” says I. He was quite confused. Turns out he hadn’t even opened the attachment before calling me.
I have my signature and then my name “handwritten” underneath in nice dark blue ink. Most people would never think the document is not “real”. The dead giveaway, of course, is that a scanned document would look much worse. The PDF you see is perfect in every way.
Really? I mean, seriously, you think that?
I thought “professional” meant “she expects you to leave the money on the nightstand”.
You’d wouldn’t believe it.
Heh.
(Seriously, though, I’m a terrible typist and my fingers run away from me. Proofreading my own stuff is mandatory.)
It isn’t usually stated so baldly, but any professional who didn’t think that way would be consistently undercut and run out of business by those who do.
Oh, I see the key problems here. In addition to being under the impression that the word “professional” means “maximizing profit”, you also have a ridiculously simplistic idea of how to maximize profit.
Government organizations (especially the military), are fixated with faxes from where I come from. I believe it is a matter of authentication (what with all the agencies’ stamps and approving officers’ signatures and etc.)
It doesn’t? I wasn’t aware “professional” meant “charitable” these days.
It was a short message board post, not a course in microeconomics. And I’ve already said that it is usually not stated that baldly.
Well, I agree for many people it doesn’t make sense. For me it does. I need a fax number. If I give my office one out, it goes to the fax department, and it takes forever to get to me.
The pro bono work I do has often given me clients who don’t know/understand email & scanners, but have access to fax machines. Through eFax, they get to do something within their comfort zone, I get the document without the bs of it going to the fax department, and it is already a pdf, so I don’t need to have my secretary scan it.
It’s a niche market, I admit, but it is great for me.