The issue with scanning and e-mailing is that e-mails travel over a public network. The operators at any router your e-mail passes through could easily sniff the traffic and reconstruct your scan before routing it on. That’s probably why places that are getting your financial or health care information prefer you to send a fax. When sending an encrypted e-mail is as easy as visiting a secure web site, then faxes will truly deserve to die, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
#2 is offest by not having to dial a number, wait for a connection, then watch the fax slowly go through the machine. When all that’s done, you wait for verification of the send and hope that the right person got the fax.
The scan/e-mail is much simpler really.
Dialing a number and waiting is not something that counts at effort.
Some of us are lazy.
I am outfitting an office right now, and I can’t wait to refuse to buy a fax machine!
What exactly is the problem with faxing? Yeah, it wastes paper, but so do a hundred million other things that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Faxing is just slower. Considering the only jerks who still care for faxes seem to be insurance and health care industries (which I’ve had the grave misfortune of working in), it is not uncommon that a fax will be used to send a giant ass 50+ page file. How stupid is it, on a scale of 1-10, to fax 50 goddamn pages? 50 pages can be scanned and emailed in 50 seconds, whereas faxing is a pain-in-the-ass waste of time. Plus electronic copies are preferable to paper copies because, well, paper copies are stupid.
I think working in insurance and health care has turned my opinion of faxes from “Outdated technology, but whatever” to “Kill it with fire, after which I shall happily perform the foxtrot on its grave!”
But won’t you miss that moment when the officious tone of voice from the person on phone who’s seeking to put the communication failure on you, grudginly checks the paper supply, asserts there’s plenty, yet suddenly alters into a different tone of voice as they ask you to re-fax?
I work on a shipping dock. We ship a lot of stuff to Canada. The truck drivers picking up these loads want to fax the paperwork ahead to customs so they can get through faster.
I work in a law office. We rely on faxes, because they are a physical, obvious sign that someone is serving us with a document. Anyone walking by will see the paper being spit out and will make sure it gets to the right person in the office.
Plus, when I send a fax, I get a confirmation it’s been received at the other end, which is essential for proving service.
An e-mail, on the other hand, can sit in cyber-space for a long time, until the recipient turns on his computer and opens up his e-mail. Plus, even with the tracking function, sometimes I don’t get any acknowledgement from the system that it’s been opened and read, so I have no proof of service.
That’s why the rules of court in my province recognise personal service of a hard copy, or a fax, as good service, but not an e-mail, unless the lawyers have agreed in advance that an e-mail is good service.
Without that agreement in advance, I fax.
So they have a fax machine on the premises, yet a scanner is completely out of whack? Enough with the 1987 top-of-the-line tech already. Guaran-fucking-tee you e-mailing a document is faster than a fax. And less stupid.
it depends on the model. lots cannot. also some won’t scan or send if ink/toner is out.
I’m not surprised that fax machines are still around. What baffles me is how angry you anti-fax people are. Do you become this livid when you see a turntable or a VCR?
And schools and real estate offices. A lot of government agencies seem to be big fax fans as well.
I hate faxing. If I have 30 pages of school records to send (not unusual, especially for special education, since an IEP can run 20 pages), I have to go to our ancient fax machine, dial the number, double-check to make sure I didn’t misdial, wait for a connection to be made, and then stand there and babysit the pages as they slowly - s-l-o-w-l-y - feed through the machine. Then I have to wait for each page to be sent (slowly), and regardless of whether I get a confirmation page or not, hope that whoever the hell is sitting by the fax machine on the other side is either the person I was sending it to or will get it to that person. Sometimes the connection fails and I have to re-try.
On my end, when our fax machine springs to life, I don’t know if it’s a junk fax (and shouldn’t those be illegal?); a personal fax for one of my co-workers from a real estate agent, insurance company, or medical provider; something for our health office that’s covered by HIPAA; or a school record (covered by FERPA, for that matter). Sometimes our machine will jam halfway through a long fax; sometimes it runs out of ink in the middle of a legal document. People from another time zone will send me faxes outside of our business hours and those will sit (with the junk faxes and the ones destined for other people or departments) until someone comes in and checks the machine. That person may or may not get all the pages of my fax to me.
If anything goes wrong on either end of these transmissions, both sides have to gear up and do it again. There’s nothing I like so much as hearing that the long-ass fax I just spent ten minutes faxing didn’t make it. It’s even better if it was a school record that I dragged out of an inactive file two days ago and then refiled. If I’d been able to scan it instead of faxing, I could have saved the images until I got a confirmation, but with a fax, I have to go haul it out again and repeat the process.
If I could, I’d shoot fax technology just to watch it die.
I think scanners are more common than faxes. Even if people want to keep the fax as an option they should at the very least allow email and suggest it as default. I kind of want them to die just because the modem sounds they make when accidentally calling a land line are obnoxious.
Some places require faxes because of the signature issue, but that is just silly because there is no way to tell if the fax you have received was truly fed through a fax on the originating end, or just a scan faxed from a computer.
Kinkos
Thats where I go to send personal faxes. We fax documents several times a day at work. Fast, easy, and reliable. If it ain’t broke why fix it?
Email goes through the internet. It can be intercepted and read. Important documents are more secure by Fax. Theres HIPAA laws to worry about with insurance documents.
Because I am never in a position where someone else can insist I deliver them a movie in VHS format and nothing else will do. Probably once a year, on average, I have something that has to be faxed. I don’t have access to a fax machine. So either I have to screw around trying to figure out some intermediate online faxing service–which I can never remember how to do, because this only comes up once a year or so–or I have to go to a pack-and-mail place and pay $1/page.
At work for work purposes, when I can hand it off to the office assistant to do, I don’t mind. I can even be persuaded that it’s still reasonable for one business to assume another business has a fax. But this crap of assuming that individual do just really annoys me.
And hope and pray you don’t get another god damn busy signal. Fuck faxes.
Oh not at all. I love the angry, insistent burr of a pin feed dot matrix printer, or a teletype machine beating the shit out of a message. Fax machines, though, are passive-aggressive assholes.
I note several people who use faxes in their work have mentioned having old-school fax machines that spit out paper as the fax is being received and consequently jam or call attention to themselves.
I realize that to a fax-hater, it may just be putting lipstick on a pig, but I am surprised that the people who do a lot of faxing these days don’t all have fax servers or virtual fax machines where the received faxes are stored electronically. That way you never have to worry about running out of paper or wasting paper on a junk fax or even getting out of your seat to see what just arrived. I would think that any organization that got more than the occasional one-off fax would have this kind of technology.