I have this in my current office, which I can live with because it works essentially the same on my end as scanning. And since the process is more or less the same, I never fax, because that would be ridiculous. It’s having to actually load documents into a fax machine (particularly if I already have them electronically and need to print them) that grinds my gears. People, let’s just e-mail like we do everything else. Let’s not communicate via smoke signals or fax machines or whatever.
Physical immediateness? Of walking into the supply room one day to replenish your staples before realizing there’s some paper tangled in the cobwebs burying your fax machine?
Maybe for a single-page document. For a large document? Arrghh! The jamming and the yelling. More yelling than anything. Let your scanner do all the work, then it’ll e-mail the doc to you, and everyone will be happy. Don’t run from happiness.
Alright, I admit it, every time someone calls about something they emailed over a few days ago that I missed, I say “ohhh noo, I can’t find it! The email must have gotten lost in the internet. Please re-send it and I’ll get to it right away.”
All while staring that email in the face and thinking “How did I miss that?! Well, I’m glad the customer will blame the internet and not me.”
Losing emails into the ether has only happened a couple times legitimately. For everything else, they spelled the email name wrong or I’m only pretending to lose it. So, about as reliable as a fax machine I’d say.
All our faxes are routed directly to email in the office. It’s a pain, because frankly we get 10x more spam faxes than actual faxes and we have to sift through it all, but it’d be more of a pain if they were actually printing out. Everyone here has a personal scanner, and that’s what we use for everything unless someone tells us ONLY fax will do. I’ll be glad when faxes die.
What I consider nervewracking is a fax paper jam. Original docs get mauled while the person on the other end receives…well, who knows.
Ah yes, I HATE that. The fax confirmation page will give you an image of the first page sent only, and you’ll sometimes get phone calls stating pages in the middle were garbled or illegible. With a scan, you can actually review how the document will be seen by the recipient.
And another thing! Page counts! Easy for a small file, but when sending 100+ page records (grr!), there is no way I am going to count out the number of pages to make sure to the complete document was sent. I had to take to scanning the thing first, and then instead of e-mailing the PDF – because f-ing Prudential only takes faxes – I’d scan to get a page count, then I would feed the whole damn thing into a fax machine and pray that the confirmation page had the correct page count. It didn’t always.
I’m half tempted to walk to the back and set our fax machine on fire out of contempt. But I won’t because it’s attached to our printer.
If you scan something to someone it’ll drop straight into their inbox. If you fax someone in a company, it may very well languish in a room somewhere until they physically pick it up. Unless it gets accidentally thrown away or picked up by someone else. Then there’s the frustration of having to fax the Department of Work and Pensions twice because you didn’t put 9 in front of the number or some other idiotic reason. I love the ‘transaction failed’ notifications faxes give you about ten minutes after you sent the fax. (More wasted paper.)
I get that none of this is exactly working-down-a-mine hard but it is really stupid that we still use this technology when alternatives are that much more efficient.
I’m basically the tech support guy for my friends and family. Half the people I help are “early adopters,” constantly looking to improve their tech. So much so, that I have to slow them down and get them to realize that sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. The other half are “laggards,” they fear change and cling to older solutions well past their peak usefulness. There is a lady I help who has MS. She has a lot of medical, financial, and legal paperwork that needs to be transmitted. I have been trying for years to get her to email whenever possible, but even though more and more institutions are getting rid of fax machines, she refuses. This is on top of the fact that her physical disabilities make manipulating a stack of papers more difficult than operating a computer.
She knows the fax, and in her mind, her life is hard enough without having to learn new shit. The frustrating part is her life would probably be better if she faxed less. The less people fax the sooner we get this “paperless office” thing. It’s a painful transition, but it has to happen.
Turn head, locate file cabinet, open drawer, pull out appropriate labeled file folder, open, pull out original paperwork or recieved fax. Probably 2 or 3 minutes.
Doesn’t everybody have a file cabinet for important paperwork and stuff like paid bills and copies of canceled checks and old tax paperwork?
And I still have an old fax/answering machine/copier. Never actually use it, we use the cell phones, but I suppose I could actually call ST&T, get a land line and hook the thing up. I did occasionally use it to make copies for a while until I got an all in one scanner/printer/copier [which I think has a fax option, actually]
Yep, the past half-dozen times I’ve had to fax something, 5 have been to health insurance companies or doctors, and the one outlier was to a judge because I drug my heels and couldn’t mail the form.
I’m just glad we have a fax machine here at the office that I can use.
A bunch of people have said this. I don’t know about you, but my sent folder has a copy of the entire email I sent, including all attachments and tells me the name and address of the person I sent it to as well as the time I sent it. And you can also add a ‘receipt confirmation’ requirement if it’s super-important that you get confirmation.
Now, maybe I have the email address wrong and I sent it to the wrong person, but the same could be said for a fax. And faxes can get lost after they’re received.
If somebody claims I never sent them an email, I can just forward them the original email from my sent folder. With a fax, I need to track down my confirmation paper, which I’ve put in a file somewhere, go to the fax machine and fax it back to them to prove I’ve sent it.
With email, all of this is done electronically in front of my computer.
Every fax machine that I’ve seen in the past 5-10 years has been one of those all-in-one machines that’s really a digital scanner that just translates the image into fax format and sends it.
Ben Fong-Torres: A Mo-Jo, it’s a very high-tech machine that transmits pages over the telephone! It only takes eighteen minutes a page! – Almost Famous (2000), describing the new fax machines.
Receipt confirmations with e-mail only work on systems that mutually agree to support it and the recipient doesn’t even have to send one back. It is usually optional even if it is supported and I usually reject it just out of principle even when I could send one back. You can easily fake any e-mail. I can send one from your mother or the person you work for to you right now and you would never know the difference. It is that easy and sent e-mail confirmations are a even easier to fake. You just type over the details before you send it back to them.
Fax machines talk back and forth to each other during every stage of the transmission and receipt so you know it was transmitted and received successfully. Sure, it could be picked up and thrown away by someone walking by the fax machine but that isn’t your problem if you have the fax receipt in hand. It is near iron-clad proof that you sent something at least when you were asked to. That is only important in a few industries or contexts but it is a feature that external e-mail cannot match even now.
A local hospital that has one of the highest levels of technology in the area still uses a FAX machine to request a volunteer to escort a patient from their room to their ride upon discharge.
I had a claim with State Farm and had to get an estimate to them. The Claims Department did NOT allow any communication via email…attachments or not. Seriously? How can anyone function without email?
At least until a year ago (I don’t have any more recent info) some governments required a DOS program to be used for communication. I know because I had to install a WHEDA program on a friend’s computer in DOS mode and there was no other choice (other than mailing paper forms).
Many bureaucracies, often government, still don’t accept email for communication, and they won’t send data that way, either. I often try to send a public service department something by email, but they only accept fax. And fax is a new development; many didn’t accept that until just a few years ago.
I know of no fax that tells you that the recipient’s machine actually printed it. If the recipient ran out of ink or paper, the sender still says it’s been sent. It may have been sent, but it may not have been received.
Most fax machines these days have internal memory that will store incoming faxes that haven’t been printed for whatever reason. Some fax machines will automatically clear the fax from memory once it’s printed, but on other machines the memory has to be cleared manually. In fact, this has become a security/privacy issue; many companies have sold off old machines without erasing the memory first.
If you like, I can show you the letter I received from my congressman in response to my fax urging him to vote for the Affordable Care Act. I don’t know if his office printed my fax or not, but it wasn’t ignored.
Faxes are dead in the age of VOIP. My poor little analog fax machine is sorely outdated in the digital world…it just can’t communicate and it works approximately 50% of the time.
I can’t wait until everyone else agrees.
My photocopier can scan and e-mail 50 pages in 50 seconds.
This sort of thing makes the difference between a fax and an email attachment pretty darn small. The all-in-one machines that scan and fax add to this. At some point, a fax that is sent electronically and is stored electronically is essentially an email attachment. The only difference is that I can easily find old emails.
Most faxes I need to send are typically longer than the free faxing service, and I am not at this time willing to invest my own money to use internet fax services.