My stepdaughter had some forms she needed to have faxed to her health insurance provider. She asked me if I could take them to work and fax them for her. Sure, no problem. So I’ve got her forms and fax cover sheet and I take them over to the fax machine - which, it should be noted, looks like it could be original equipment from when they opened this office twenty years go.
The first thing I notice is an error message that the paper tray is empty. I guess it won’t let me fax anything unless there is paper in the tray so that it can print a confirmation page. I head over to the printer area and grab a small stack of paper and put it in the paper tray. OK, now let’s get faxing. I punch in the fax number, put the pages in the feeder tray, and hit Send. It sucks all three pages through at one time. I take the second page and put it back in the feeder tray. The machine pulls it in just far enough that it has a good grip on it, then stops. I hit cancel and it spits the page out, so I decide to start over.
Punch in the phone number, put one page in the tray, hit Send. It pulls the first page through. I put the second page in the tray. It pulls it through. I put the third page in, it again pulls it in far enough to get a good grip on it, but won’t feed the third page through. So I hit cancel again, but this time it won’t spit the third page out. I have to very gently try to pull it back out without tearing it. Eventually I get the page loose.
I’m about ready to start my third attempt when some woman walks by and says “That fax machine doesn’t work very well. It’s kind of temperamental.” I grin and say “Yeah, I’m finding that out.” She says “I think you scan it and send it as a fax from the printer.” I knew that I could scan something on the copier/printer and have it email me a PDF, but didn’t know it could send faxes. So I head over to the printer to see if I have any better luck there.
About a month or so ago they put security codes on the printer, so when you print something from your desk you have to punch your code into the printer before it will print. I’m trying to find the menu option on the printer to allow me to fax, but before it will let me do anything it wants me to log in. So I enter my network ID and my printer security code, and it tells me it can’t log me in. So I try my network ID and password, and that doesn’t work either. Fine, I tell myself, there have to be other fax machines in this office.
I go back to my desk and send an IM to one of the ladies in our operations area. “Hey Peggy, do you guys have a fax machine back there?” “Sure do,” she replies. “A brand new one!” “Great, I’ll be right there” I reply, and head back to the operations area. I walk up to Peggy’s desk and ask her where the fax machine is. “Over there on the scanner table” she says, pointing in the general direction of the back wall. Even though she said “scanner” (we have a couple of large high-speed document scanners), I heard “copier”, so I head back to the corner where the copier is, and there’s a fax machine on a table right next to it.
Here we go again. I punch in the number, put the pages in the feeder tray at the top, hit send, it makes some noise, then asks me to scan the next page or hit Send. Except it didn’t pull any of my pages through. So I tell it to scan the next page, and the same thing happens. At which point I realize that there is a flatbed I’m supposed to be using to scan the pages, not put them in the feeder. I scan the three pages and hit send. It dials out, then it starts beeping at me. I have no idea what the problem is. Then Peggy comes over and says “Not that one! That one doesn’t work. It’s over here.” And she points to the table next to the document scanner, where their new fax machine is sitting.
Third fax machine is a charm, as they say. I key in the phone number, put the pages in the feeder - oh wait, Peggy said face down - turn them over, hit send, and it pulls my pages through one at a time, sends them, and beeps cheerfully at me that the job is completed.
And then I get back to my desk to answer a frantic call from a coworker asking me if I had any idea what was wrong with the production database, because the web site is spewing out all kinds of errors. Which also turned out to be my fault, but that’s a story for another day.