Nov

19

Just The Fax.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 19, 2008 |

Remember a great to-do a few years ago about the paperless society? I remember reading an article about ten years ago (I can’t remember where, especially since I have a hard time remembering even what happened yesterday) about offices where supervisors were making their staff throw out all paper. Even though there’s been a lot of progress made towards reducing the amount of paper used by offices, it’s still, a decade later, premature to say we live in a “paperless society”. The article I read all those years ago may have been referring to the study Network, Screen and Page - The Future of Reading in a Digital Age, produced by the Electronic Document Systems Foundation.

In spite of its flaws, paper remains a viable medium, and yet it’s amazing to me how much has changed just since I started working. At my first job, working in customer service for a company that served the trucking industry, I used a fax machine for the first time. I’m pretty sure in three months there I used it only twice, although my memory may be exaggerating. It’s possible I only used it once. When I started working at the library where I am now, I had to use the fax machine a lot more frequently, mainly to communicate with overseas businesses, or just to send copies of documents. And I can’t tell you how frustrating other peoples’ ignorance could be sometimes. My most common experience was putting my document in the fax machine, dialing the number, and hearing someone on the other end pick it up and say, “Hello?” I’d snatch up the receiver and say, “I was trying to reach your fax machine.” And they’d say, “Oh, yes, you did, go ahead and send your document.” What we have here is a failure to…oh, never mind.

Then came e-mail. The first e-mail program I ever used was called Pegasus. It was user-friendly, intuitive, and loaded with interesting features, so of course it was scrapped before long. Even before we all became fluent in things like e-mail attachments it was still wonderful. It was an instantaneous form of communication. Well, almost instantaneous. I didn’t expect immediate responses, but it did make communication a lot faster. And e-mail allowed me to store copies of sent messages in a convenient and easily searchable place. If anyone ever had any questions, I could retrieve a copy of a message I’d sent and prove I’d been doing my job.

It was back in 1995 that I first started using e-mail, and although it quickly caught on at a lot of companies it still took a while for it to be adopted widely. I still had to communicate with some companies by phone or, in a lot of cases, by fax. One European company that shall remain nameless (at least in part because not many people would recognize them) had a problem with sending faxes. They had no trouble receiving faxes, but they’d type their response, put in an envelope and mail it to me. This meant not only that it would risk getting lost but it would take weeks, or even months, to get to me. In spite of the time difference there was no reason they couldn’t get a fax back to me within a few days. They could even put their typed reply back into the fax machine. They were probably even spending more in postage than they would have in phone bills. I started adding notes like, “Please reply by fax” and even “This bill will remain unpaid until I’ve received your response.” I wasn’t going to be responsible if they cut off our account just because they couldn’t figure out how to use the send function on their fax machine.

Then one day I noticed they’d started including an e-mail address on their bills. I was thrilled. They had e-mail! Yes, it’s true, I needed to get a life, but, hey, at least it was making my job a little easier. I sent them an e-mail, expecting a response within a few days. Then a week went by. Then two weeks. Then a month. Then, one day, I got a letter. I swear I’m not making this up. They’d printed my e-mail, typed a response on it, and mailed it to me. Paper has its advantages, but that was just ridiculous.

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