Self-explanatory.
Sua
Let this happen to you at five a.m., then come back here and we’ll compare notes.
Goddamn, I am still seething, and that was 2 years ago…
Identify their number with Caller ID and then fax 'em your xeroxed ass.
Time for Call Blocker. Next time the phone rings, hang up, then pick it up and dial *60. Listen to the instructions; they’ll include a method for blocking the number that last called you, even if you don’t know what it is.
Be aware, though, that your local phone company might charge for Call Blocker. Probably not more than a couple bucks.
I got chewed out yesterday by my manager for letting my voicemail overload. I checked my inbox, to find I had 21 messages from a fax machine (my VM will collect faxes, too).
All blank.
Bastards.
If you are in some sort of office you can trying transferring th call to a one of the office fax machines. I’ve had to do that a few times. If you are at home then you may be SOL.
ugh. i had that happen to me when i was working for a local church a few months ago. we didn’t even have a fax machine, and only one phone line. it was really starting to drive me bonkers, and i couldn’t get any work done.
Damn it, SUA, how can I send you mash notes if you don’t hook up your fax?? I can’t speed-dial you forever!
[sub]One less breathlessly panting missive for you; get with the program, sheesh.[/sub]
Ugh. When I got my cell phone, in California, I had this problem.
EVERY SINGLE DAY, between 11-3, a fax machine would call me, repeatedly. Caller ID didn’t pick up the number. Call Block didn’t work. So my voicemail would fill up with like 100 messages, all just going “Beep. BEEP. Beep… beep…”
Sprint wasn’t willing to help me out at all, and woulda charged me to change my number. It stopped when I moved out here to RI and changed my number… fucker followed me all the way to Arkansas though. That’s where I first noticed the calls stopped.
Frustrating as hell!
Had that happen once at my work; because we had three office lines it would come in on my line, then Holger’s line, then Nikki’s line.
Finally, after about the sixth go-around, when it hit Holger’s phone he hollered into the handset “THIS IS NOT A GODDAMNED FAX MACHINE!!!” (yes, there were about that many exclamation points attached to his statement.)
Not five minutes later we got an incredibly apologetic phone call from the broker who’d been faxing our phone.
Um, Actually, Sua honey, that’s me.
I’ve been told my voice has an odd mechanical quality to it before, but geez.
I don’t know if your telephone company has the same policy, but here, if somenone is receiving faxes from a wrong number they can call the telephone company and the company will block the call and send a fax to the person sending the fax telling them not to fax at that number.
I shamefully admit that I have twice unwillingly harassed people with the fax at work. What happened was this: I was printing out purchase orders and faxing them to the suppliers every day just before leaving (around 5:30PM). Before we programmed the numbers in the Fax, it happened twice that I misdialed the number and sent some of the purcharse order faxes to private homes. The next morning, we’d have a fax in the machine with the number we had sent the fax to and a note saying that the person had complained and that if it happened again there could be fines. I was just sooooo embarassed! At least, our fax only sends the message 10 times, retrying every 10 minutes. I know it must have been incredibly annoying for the person receiving the faxes, and I was thankful we had not set it to call back every 15 seconds for 120 minutes (the maximum callbacks it would do). The thing is, a lot of the time if the fax didn’t do callbacks, our faxes would not get through. When you’re sending orders to suppliers, even if they have a lot of faxes you will get a busy signal so you need the callback option.
Still, the person who set up the fax that is calling you is an asshole. Even if you have the right numbers programmed in, having the Fax on instant callback (15 seconds) is frowned upon by a lot of people. Some people monitor the fax lines as to number of calls, number of hangups, busy signals, number of faxes sent/received, etc… If you have 2-3 idiots with constant recall on their faxes and you get hit by one while you’re receiving a lenghty fax, it’s going to screw up the statistics.
Try calling your telephone company and telling them that you’re being harassed by a fax that won’t stop calling. It is likely they will have solutions to the problem, and if you’re lucky it might even be a free service.
Can you hook your computer up to the phone line and get it to receive the fax?
This is why I use efax.com for my faxes.
It’s also possible that it’s someone using a faxing service such as Surecom or Xpedite. Those services have several hundred phone lines to accommodate customers with large fax lists, and they program in a retry algorithm for each job which tells the system to try each number X number of times until it goes through or until every number on the list has been tried.
What a coincidence - my sucky temp job required that I fax every 10-digit-number in the Western Hemisphere today. Sorry 'bout that. Don’t worry, I’ll be calling all the numbers where the fax didn’t go through to see if you got the fax. But that’s not 'til tomorrow.
I work for the 8th largest law firm in the US, with around 20 offices worldwide wired into a seamless web by some of the most advanced telecommunications equipment and systems commercially available.
I call the telecoms support unit to inform them of the repeated fax calls. Their response: “yeah, that happens all the time. Nothing we can do about it.”
Sua
I used to get 2:00am fax calls too. I set up some fax software on my PC and let it catch the fax. I found who they were really trying to reach and got them to sort it out.
I’m guilty of annoying people by faxing their phone lines repeatedly. (although never as much as some of you have reported) Then I learned, that if I was having difficulty getting a fax to go through, to sit by the fax machine and listen to see if a person answered the phone . This allowed me to apologize to the person and to establish how wrong my information was.
When I receive calls like this I try to not hang up immediately (unless I get really irritated) and try to get someone’s attention on the other end. It works sometimes.
Jodi, send it again - you’ll come out of the experience with a new respect for the males of the species. 
Sua