I faxed a transcript order form to Prometric to have them send my DSST scores to my school. I called them immediately after to confirm that they received it, and they told me that they have a delay of about a week before they can see faxes.
I’ve never heard of faxes being delayed like this. What would be causing such a long wait period? Faxes are supposed to happen in a matter of minutes.
my WAG is that Fax’es are so uncommon now that there is probably only one in the building and that it takes several days for someone (else) to actually check it and drop it into ‘internal mail’ to get it to the correct person’s desk.
I also find this odd. Faxes are used fairly frequently in government related work. But, the fax comes in as a PDF to your email type thing. Something-something-something that sending a fax is more formal or deliberate than an email, and something with contracts. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
But, yes, maybe as stated above the receiving end has a single fax machine now in a dusty mail room, someplace.
I imagine an ancient figure, clad in a black suit with a high wing collared shirt shuffling down an underground passage on his weekly visit to the Fax Room. The last remaining clerk in the entire organisation who knows how to tend to this long forgotten equipment, he presses the ‘print’ button with a trembling finger and a single piece of paper clatters forth. He sighs, remembering the days when there would have been a mountain of advertisements and special offers to wade through.
He stares at the copy with rheumy eyes and switches the machine off before heading off to the mail room.
He must have one of those newfangled fax machines with a memory that can store the fax before printing. Classic faxes had no memory to speak of and printed as they received the data.
We have a brand-new fax machine in my small federal agency’s head office; its very first fax was sent out today. But prior to this new machine, the old one was broken for 10 months and nobody was motivated enough to even report it until I found out and did so.
I concur that the people claiming “a week” are talking about some systemic delay, not a technical delay.
Sometimes it is recommended to personally speak to someone at the site and get them to agree to stand beside the fax machine and retrieve the fax the moment it comes through; I don’t know if they’d be willing to do that in the OP’s case.
In the OP, I don’t know what Prometric, DSST, or “fax machine” is. Oh, wait, fax machine! Yeah, I remember.
So it sounds like this is a private test taking company that is being asked to send scores to a college?
I would imagine that this company gets a very large number of requests to send test scores out, and they operate on a first-in-first-out basis. That would mean that someone isn’t waiting specifically for our eager young college student to call and think that he can jump to the front of the line for processing these test score forms just because he faxed them a request.
This made me laugh, but you should know that I work in an office that sends and receives well over a hundred faxes a day.
mmm