Just wait until you have a 15 page document that needs to be sent to 10 people. All of a sudden the scan and email thing seems like a much better idea.
“Show me the CarScanAndEmail!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Oh, and I’ve noticed that more people carry cell phones (hence can read emails) than fax machines in their pockets and purses. I don’t have statistics on that, it’s just an observation.
So, scanning and E-mailing is more convenient for some jobs than faxing. You can make such a comparison for most pairs of tools. How does that mean that faxes should disappear?
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the fax confirmation.
When the fax machine spits out that piece of paper you have proof (as in good enough to take to court proof) that the fax went through.
Emails don’t provide proof of receipt.
More than once I have had the following conversation:
Them: you never faxed it
Me: yes I did
Them: no we never got it
Me: is your fax number xxx-xxx-xxxx?
Them: yes
Me: I faxed it to that number at 10:15 this morning and I have printed confirmation that will stand up in court that it was received.
Them: but I never got it
Me: that is not my problem that is an internal issue with your company that I am not responsible for. So I’ll tell you what, if you stop claiming I never faxed it, and ask nicely I will fax it again.
Them: would you fax it again it never got to me
Me: I would be happy to, go stand by the fax machine, I’m sending it now.
If it is the same 10 people over and over you set up a distribution list in the fax machine. One button and done.
This is an excellent point; I’d just add that you don’t have to be “clueless” to have difficulty with this process. If scanning is something you don’t do very often, it’s NOT intuitively obvious how you go about scanning a document and turning it into a multipage PDF that isn’t huge, has acceptable resolution and is suitable for emailing. There is software out there that will make the process easier but many people wouldn’t even know to go looking for it. I’m astounded that people are stridently insisting that scan-and-email is easier.
Manda JO had another good point upthread: many fax-loving, bureaucratic entities blandly assume that every human being has a fax machine handy; although there are online services that allow you to send and receive faxes without a machine, it’s hard to remember all that if you only need to fax once or twice a year. But most of the anti-fax arguments voiced here amount to “Ewww! Old technology, ick!”
This. Everyone uses email, except for the kids who just text each other and post to Facebook. But many of us almost never use a fax, and it’s a big hassle when we have to track down a fax machine and use it. There are a few ancient fax machines around the office, but on those roughly once-a-year occasions when I need to send one, I have no idea whether it’s really sent anything or not.
Whoever said you just use it like a telephone - excuse me, but WTF? I always know whether my call got through: either I’m talking to someone, or I’m listening to somebody’s ‘on hold’ music, or it didn’t get through. With a fax machine, it’s ‘well, I pushed some buttons that as best as I can tell should have resulted in a fax being sent, but I have zero evidence that this machine actually did that.’ Until the institution I have to send annual faxes to lets me know, several days later, that they received it.
I’ve never lost an email to the ether. When I send an email, either it’s successfully sent, or I get a message back saying I’ve sent it to an invalid address.
Email combines the sending and the recordkeeping into one step: there’s the email, and there’s the attachment, and I’ll be able to find them pretty much forever.
Maybe faxing works just as well as emailing for those of you who have had a time in your life when you’ve used fax machines routinely, and you know whether the stupid machine did what it was supposed to do or not. But you remember the 1980s when ‘everybody’ was faxing? There’s a big difference between ‘everybody’ and everybody. And for those of us in the complement of ‘everybody’, those rare encounters with this strange, archaic, and not particularly comprehensible machine are a source of uncertainty, confusion, and all-around hassle.
I’m OK with people who like faxing, faxing with each other. But the rest of us shouldn’t have to fax, thankyewverymuch. Here endeth the rant.
Maybe.
Three men, one German, one Japanese and a hillbilly were sitting naked in a sauna. Suddenly there was a beeping sound. The German pressed his forearm and the beep stopped. The others looked at him questioningly. “That was my pager,” he said, “I have a micro chip under the skin of my arm.” A few minutes later a phone rang. The Japanese fellow lifted his palm to his ear. When he finished he explained, “That was my mobile phone. I have a micro chip in my hand.” The hillbilly felt decidedly low tech, but not to be outdone he decided he had to do something just as impressive. He stepped out of the sauna and went to the bathroom. He returned with a piece of toilet paper hanging from his behind. The others raised their eyebrows and stared at him. The hillbilly finally said…“Well, will you look at that, I’m getting a fax.”
There are a bunch of services where you can email to a fax machine, just sayin’
Almost all fax machines have some kind of notification of successful faxing, be it printed or listed on the display.
I have seen emails come in months after they were sent. I have seen emails get rejected because of the return receipt request, I have seen emails just go nowhere. I have seen plenty of emails go into the spam folder. That final one is a biggie. There are some companies that I only fax because their email is so overfiltered I doubt anyone gets through.
Given the level of aggravation that I get from a fax machine once a year, it might even be worth it to learn once each year how to use one of those services. (And yes, the ‘once each year’ is in the right place in the sentence.) But again, it’s a matter of learning something all over again each year.
And you know this, how? I’m assuming it’s because, either now or at some earlier point in your life, you used fax machines with some frequency.
I’ve gotten those notifications sometimes when I’ve used one of our fax machines. I don’t know when they appear; I’ve never waited around long enough for one, but sometimes I’ll find one with the number I was sending to on it if I come back by the fax machine sometime later. Or maybe not.
Wow. Sucks to be you, is all I can say. I’ve really never had that problem. At any rate, I have no problem with your willingness to use fax machines. But I just don’t see why I should have to learn to use a fax machine at a time when it’s certainly a receding technology, for the once a year I need to send a fax.
There is no need to be condescending to people have to use faxes sometimes and actually know how to use them. I work in IT for megacorps and faxing still comes up often enough. I am not a fan of them in general but they aren’t going away anytime soon so it is best if everyone who works in an office environment understands how they work.
E-mail has problems of its own. It is a generally open standard that is not secure in the least. There are plenty of ways to slap security on top of the e-mail standard to make it more secure that only works internally or with external partners that have their e-mail system configured the exact same way. Fax machines, as primitive as they seem, are actually more secure (in the electronic not physical sense) than e-mail and they can all generate delivery confirmation receipts. As noted, that is incredibly important in some contexts.
Faxes aren’t going away completely any time soon (again they have been with us since well before the Civil War until today so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to disappear totally) so it is best just to learn how they work and appreciate them for what they should be used for.
They might never go away completely, but few things do (we didn’t throw away the quill when we invented the fountain pen).
Who’s being condescending? I’m not sure why he has such problems with emailing people he does business with, but it’s gotta suck. I don’t have those problems, and I’m glad I’m not in his situation.
Nuts to that. We’re talking about a piece of technology that I didn’t need back in its heyday of the 1980s, nor did I need it in the 1990s as it was being supplanted by email for most uses. Nor did I need it during most of the 2000s. But in 2008, I needed to fax a couple of documents relating to the adoption process for the Firebug, and I’ve needed to fax one document a year involving personal business rather than work starting in 2009. If it weren’t for those two things, I’d probably have made it to retirement without ever having to use this backwater technology known as the fax machine.
Around my office, the fax machine is so valued that it sits on a short corridor nowhere near any administrative professionals, as we call them these days. I never encounter anyone else at the machine when I use it. Which is one of the reasons it’s so hard to learn to use the machine. If I’d needed to send and receive faxes during the 1980s or early to mid 1990s, I’m sure I’d have had plenty of people doing the same thing that I could have gotten help from. But nowadays, if the instructions at the machine itself are unclear, there’s nobody to go to, because hardly anyone else uses the machine, and I never actually encounter the few people that do.
This is not being treated as an important piece of technology that one ought to be competent in. R or Sharepoint, maybe. Fax? No.
I do get what you’re saying - email is great for most things, and it IS easier if the document you want to send is already in electronic form.
But when you have a physical document to send, it’s easier to fax than to scan, save, convert if necessary, find, attach to your email, and then send.
It’s not hard to learn how to use a fax machine. Place your document and dial the number is pretty much it. I’m betting it only seems hard for some people because a) they’re not interested in learning and b) the only time they even look at the fax machine is when they have to send a document urgently, and/or the person who usually does it isn’t around.
With email you don’t know if the document or file ‘went through’. It might be in your sent folder but that’s all you know, with a fax you get printed confirmation of what number the fax was sent to, number of pages sent, and whether or not it was sent successfully - often actually printed on a copy of the first page of whatever it was you sent.
I don’t think the fax is going to go away completely any time soon either. For what it’s worth, I do work in healthcare lol.
Law too.
And real estate.
I have to deal with insurance companies all the time. The nearest fax machine is almost two blocks away. I have to walk to the fax machine, then I have to wait five minutes to make sure the fax goes through, and walk back. Usually I run into a few people who want to ask me just one question while I’m there, and with all that said and done, it takes about 20-30 minutes to send a fax. An email with ten attachments takes 1-2 minutes.
If the fax machine were a bit closer, it wouldn’t be a problem. With a fax machine far away, it’s a major inconvenience.
On a related note -
Why the hell can’t all those banks, insurance companies and whatever the hell else make their PDFs the form fillable type where I can click on the field and type my text, they print and sign?
Instead of the godawful print every single entry in tiny tiny handwriting?
And also - for those that send word documents, (like job applications) why can’t they just use that template thingy that lets me fill in the boxes instead of stupid “hit the space bar while underlining” supposed trick they use?
it’s really not that hard!!
There are many services on the internet that will take your file and fax it for you. Most are cheaper than the copy stores, some are even free for short faxes.
And before you say that the internet is insecure, how do you know that the copy place isn’t keeping copies for itself? Or maybe some unscrupulous employee or intruder isn’t turning on the “store copy” feature in the fax machines themselves and later retrieving the data?
There have been many recent reports of credit card thieves somehow switching out the credit card readers at cash registers in retail stores with identical-looking units that send a copy of your credit card data to the thieves. It would be a lot simpler to do that with a fax machine.