I cheated a little bit on the poll, because I’ve been on vacation for 4 weeks. But assuming what you really want to know is if we use faxes regularly and/or frequently, I answered “yes”. I’m in the medical field, and use both an online fax service (which I vastly prefer, as I can get important faxes when I’m out and about in my working day and don’t have a fax machine in my car) and I also use the physical fax machine in my employer’s office.
I still think they’re stupid, primarily because of how they fuck with the resolution and encourage handwritten orders instead of typed ones. A digitally created and sent document will never make me question a doctor’s order simply because I can’t read it. Even an original that’s scanned and then sent by email or online fax service doesn’t degrade too much. But by the time someone’s got an original document, faxes it to my work where it’s printed out and then they refax it to me? I’m lucky if I can read the patient’s name, much less her test results.
I wish I knew enough about how to safely alter a confidential document to post a link to an example or three without violating HIPAA so you could see what I’m talking about. I waste literally hours a week making phone calls to clarify faxed information, some of it very urgent indeed.
Yes, I’ve sent and received faxes regularly over the past four weeks. Can’t give you the numbers, because it’s such a routine event that I don’t keep track.
Not only do I fax daily at work, but I had to fax some stuff for my boyfriend’s work comp claim last week. And then some more stuff to my auto lienholder.
One of my coworkers a couple of states away was having computer problems this week, so he had to fax me the documents, instead of scanning and emailing as he normally would have.
Totally confirmed my suspicion that any text below a certain size is really hard to read!
Before this week, it had been about a year since the last time, when I had to fax several documents related to refinancing our mortgage.
Oddly enough, yes - I am getting set to go back to graduate school in the fall, and I had to get an immunization form signed by my doctor, and (short of my actually stopping by the office) they’d only do it via fax. The answer would have been “no” for most of the past few years, though I did have to do some business related faxes in 2010. Yeah, faxes are pretty rare. Dead technology! Get rid of them!
I can’t remember the last time I sent or received a fax. I had an admin job from about 1995 to 1997; I think I used the fax machine there occasionally.
I haven’t directly done so, but I recently had blood tests and results were sent by fax to my doctor. However there may have been no fax machine involved, computers can fax to each other directly. It’s just a data representation format.
I have never sent nor received a fax and if someone told me that they were going to fax me something, I would crack up and make jokes about telegraphs, probably.
Monday I spent the morning fielding calls from someone who kept hanging up when I answered. I finally realized it was a fax machine calling our voice line. I googled it and it was an insurance company with which we have no business, so they were obviously mistaken. I called the company and they were quite rude about my request that they stop repeatedly trying to fax my voice line. Then the faxes kept coming.
So I sent a fax back with big type about how they need to stop and we’ve got no business with them and blah blah blah. It stopped.
To clarify my comment abou the number of faxes, I use email for work documents a lot more than I fax. I have around 700 emails in the same time period, which also counts a week I took off work.
I haven’t had anything to do with a fax or a fax machine in months, probably years, and yet I’m entirely gobsmacked by the results. More than 50% of people polled have had dealings with fax machines in the last 4 weeks? Astounding.
Our hospital lab’s fax machines are in constant use. We send and receive many faxes each day. Faxing is a more secure way to send confidential patient data than computer networks are (although as WhyNot indicated above, they are not without other problems).
