The Fax Of Life
September 21st, 2007At work, we have a thing called a “fax machine”. This is sort of like the bastard lovechild of a marriage betwixt 14.4kbps dial-up modem and a bad photocopier. It’s designed to send images over a phoneline, like a really shit version of email. It has many disadvantages over email:
- The resolution is worse.
- It can’t send sound, video, files or text. Just images.
- If you want to send something from your screen you have to print it then give the paper to the fax.
- If it receives something then it prints it whether you want it to or not and you can’t just look at it without printing it.
- It very often doesn’t work.
- When it doesn’t work, it sits there making dial-up modem noises and shouting “the other person has hung up” on a loudspeaker, and offers no apparent way to mute this.
- They tie up your phone line
- If someone faxes your phone line by mistake then you get pestered with beeps all afternoon.
It’s much bigger than a computer and costs a substantial fraction of the price of a cheap PC. So what the hell is it for? Even if we assume that we have to deal with people who like receiving and sending faxes, there still doesn’t seem to be any advantage to owning a massive machine over just getting an online service to do it via email.
Why do fax machines exist? What are they for? What do they want?
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September 21st, 2007 at 22:28
I think I remember the first demonstration of fax machine technology on Tomorrow’s World. It didn’t work, because someone had put a cable guard across a cable rather than over it.
What I don’t understand is why some people expect you to print something out, sign it, and then fax it. As if this is somehow a valid authentication method.
September 21st, 2007 at 23:29
I didn’t even know they still existed. I’ve only seen them merged with the printer-scanner-copier combos.
September 26th, 2007 at 10:44
I blame Americans. Especially conference hotels in America. They’re the only people who ever want to fax stuff to me, or ask me to fax stuff back. Sometimes, they’ll even email me a pdf, which they then want me to print off, fill in and fax back. Duh? Can’t you send an editable document I can just type and email back?
And they also don’t understand time zones, so I sometimes get woken up at 3am to receive a fax from them. or a phone call to ask me what my fax number is (same as you’ve just dialled, that’s what “tel/fax” means) and an inability to understand international dialling codes.
Gee – look what you provoked! [/end rant]