Fax or repair daily

[muckefuck]

Oh, and just as an aside to all the dealing with real estate agents, attorneys, mortgage companies, insurance companies, and so forth we've been doing over the past several weeks, I'd like to ask one question:

What is this word "fax" they like to use?

I'm sorry, I'm a "digital migrant" like the rest of them--so is monshu, and he's older than EDVAC--and we never, ever, think of sending a fax if there is any other alternative--which there almost always is, because HELLO WE'RE LIVING IN THE COMPUTER AGE.

I understand that e-signatures are still not widely-accepted and so sometimes you need a facsimile of the original print document. But, lordy, people, buy a goddamn scanner already. Fuckin' $80 at Best Buy. Your seat cushion cost more than that.

And if it's not something like a signed contract, why are you even resorting to 1970s technology at all? What do you mean, you don't have an electronic version? What do you have, letters carved into a stone tablet by a bird? Are we living in the fucking Flintstones? Honestly!

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I know you're irritated. Just in case you're also bored, I thought you might be amused by this:
http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com/2007/07/hairiness-makes-man.html

Quite so, on the fax issue. Sometimes people ask me for a fax number and are amazed if I don't have one. I'm tempted to say that I also don't have a record player, a wax-cell recorder, a typewriter or a Stenograph, but I'm usually too polite.

I have worked as a paste-up artist and moveable type printer, though, so cut, paste and leading perhaps mean more to me that to most folks.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It needs saying.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

You might want to take a look at this:

FAQ: How can I send a fax from the Internet?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'll mail it to all my contacts!

[areia.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I was going to point out. When we bought our place here, I sent several documents that *had* to be faxed by just pasting a scanned signature into an electronic document and then 'faxing' it to the number.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I had to train people over here to send email attachments instead of faxes. It was self-interest, I didn't want to do data entry when I could just import data from spreadsheets.

It was a little bit hard at first!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Don't even get me started! I have a co-worker who would occasionally ask me for transliterations of non-Roman parallel titles. She expected me to write them down on a slip of paper to give to her. I had to argue with her--every time!--to simply give me the record numbers so I could go into the database myself and entre them (with all their tricky diacritics) directly.

Our Friend, the pdf

[lustronheloise.livejournal.com]

I have a small mission in life to educate everyone around me about the amazing powers of acrobat professional.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

People!

[lhn.livejournal.com]

How about this: a coworker who asked me to show him how to scan... because he wanted to print out an order record, then scan it so he could email it. I think I may have whimpered at the very Rube Goldbergness of the concept.

To be fair, the way the order record displayed wasn't amenable to just saving and attaching. But I was able to hook him up with a free PDF generator, so he could "print" to a file that could then be sent as an email attachment.

Re: Our Friend, the pdf

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You don't even need that! lhn showed me a nifty free tool that gives you the same functionality. I was able to use it to send copies of all my financials to the mortgage people (who are still asking for "your two latest pay stubs" as if there were any professionals left in the developed world who was still cashing paper paychecks and keeping the stubs).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's like screen captures were never even invented!

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It's been a while, but I think that the screen didn't actually show the information (or at least not in the format the recipient wanted)-- it was designed to generate printed forms. Which is a design flaw, but one we had to work around.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

How is it that beepers are next to extinct but faxes keep on kicking??? I work in advertising and there's still a frightening number of small businesses who list a fax number, suggesting there's still a decent number of people faxing one another...

LEONARDO

[pne.livejournal.com]

Not that long ago, German advertising/design agencies would advertise a LEONARDO number (for transferring data over an ISDN line) -- also quaintly anachronistic IMO.

For all I know, it's still alive.

Re: Our Friend, the pdf

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

is that basically the same as the Save As PDF option you get on the Mac print menu? One-click joy, but no formatting control?

Re: LEONARDO

[lhn.livejournal.com]

The trailing edge lasts a long, long time.

During the 1970s, my dad worked for the New York Public Service Commission, the state body that regulates public utilities. Electricity, gas... and, at least in those days before deregulation, phone service. He was recently telling me that every few years, they'd have a party to celebrate retiring the last crank driven phone system (you see them in old movies: caller turns the crank a few times to get the operator's attention at the other end, then tells Mabel at Central to connect him) in the state. Then they'd find another one. In the 1970s.

(According to a Google hit of unknown reliability, the last hand-cranked phones in the country were retired in 1983. Another site shows a news story or press release from then, complete with the former owner of the local phone company standing over a pile of old wooden box phones. So they coexisted with microcomputers, early cell phones, and the Internet as a government/academic network.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Is it perfect yet?

[donncha22.livejournal.com]

Totally OT here, ach... an ionann Monshu agus "mon chou"? Is é sin a chloisim nuair a léim na litreacha sin. Is focal é a déarfadh do mhamó, is dócha, ach tá mé sách sean le cuimhne a bheith agam air!

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

Same experience here. My lawyer wanted all paper documents (including FAXes). When I sent him something electronically, he literally had no idea how to print it out. I printed it out for him when I came into his office.

They are just stuck in the past, which is silly. Their lives would be eaiser if they adopted to the present.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Tá sorry orm a rá--go háirithe tar éis an neomait Phroustaigh sin--ach focal Seapáinise is ea "Monshu". Nuair a theastaíonn leasainm Fraincise dó uaim is "le Chenu" a thugaim air.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Perfection can never be achieved, only iteratively approached. But LJ won't let me edit it again now that you've replied to it, so I guess we can let it stand.

(Though I suppose I could delete it and repost it with emendations...)

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Maybe not. Adapting means climbing the learning curve again, sticking with the tried and true often mostly means that other people are inconvenienced. :-)

Re: Our Friend, the pdf

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Probably-- I haven't used recent Macs enough to compare. But it basically masquerades as a printer, so the formatting control is whatever you can do with printed documents in the program that produced it. (So a fair amount in Word, less in Firefox.)

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

LOL. Fair enough.