don't you want the poor student go to school?

[depechemodefan]

Egad, within the same hour of talking to handicap guy about there is no free parking for the handicapped, I get this woman.

Works at some out of town University: FU
: me

FU: Hi, I want your fax number.
me: what dept. are you trying to fax to?
FU: I have a student who needs me to fax him something.
me: Does he work here?
FU: no
me: we don't have a fax service.
FU: Do you have a scanner, where if he prints out the form he can scan it and send it to us?
me: we dont' have scanners.
FU: well this student has to get this fax
me: he can go to Office Max or Office Depot and fax or receive a fax from there.
FU: Can I talk to your supervisor?
me: (tries to find a super, but they are either all out to lunch or the only one not out to lunch tells me she is too busy helping people, to get the woman's ph. number
me: ok, they are all out to lunch or helping other patrons, but if you leave you name and number someone will get back to you.
FU: (gives me info)
me: I have to ask, why did you call us, why not get him to go to Fedex or Office Max?
FU: he is a poor student, don't you want him to get an education? Other libraries allow me to fax to them. This just for one student, you can afford that.
me: Well then if we offer the service to him we have to offer the service to everyone, for example, the homeless people who have no money.

Anyway, this was at the end of my shift so I was able to give the FU's info. to the super I talked to. Another super was nearby and said I could have told her about the place in the X that has fax services and I told her the woman was from out of town. Luckily the super didn't give in to the FU.

You know, before there was fax services, there was the postal service. Did this kid not get his paperwork done before the deadline? And if it wasn't his/her fault, maybe this twat could break the rules so the kid could have extended the deadline? Obviously she wants us to break the rules.

[BeenThereDoneThat]

Classic SC "but everyone else does it" line. Sorry for her student, but you're right, either he didn't do his work on time and now has to try to make up for it, or she's just making up stories to save a few cents. I graduated from college in 1990...there were fax machines and even (gasp) personal computers then, but I don't remember any work that required a fax. These poor, poor students today

[BeenThereDoneThat]

IMO we should just start getting rid of fax machines entirely and making sure everyone has a scanner instead...much easier to scan something and just e-mail it, and probably more secure in a lot of work/school environments also.

Patiokitty, sorry about your student loan screwup. What a pain those things are.

[PepperElf]

ya scanners are awesome for that.

[protege]

When the fax machine at work finally breaks, we're not getting another one. There's simply no point of buying another one...because everything is scanned and emailed now.

[emax4]

Man, i wish that were true. We have temps in our office and the staffing firm still insists on faxed copies. Before we moved it created chaos every so often because we had to redo the phone lines. Scanning would be a lot easier, i agree, and then having the scannee email their document over to their destination.

To some degree, perhaps scanning is simple to some people, but with so many buttons and options it's a whole new world of "HUH?" to others.

[bsaana]

IMO we should just start getting rid of fax machines entirely and making sure everyone has a scanner instead...much easier to scan something and just e-mail it, and probably more secure in a lot of work/school environments also.

Patiokitty, sorry about your student loan screwup. What a pain those things are.

From my time at CITS doing phone support: There is only one reason fax machines are still in widespread use - they are legal documents. Meaning you can fax papers for buying/selling homes, cars and even use it to fax a check to the bank for deposit.

Digitally signed email just has not caught on, but when it does it will kill off the fax as laws were already passed to make digitally signed emails legal documents like faxes are.

[emt_cookies]

Our fax machine receives faxes from the dispatch but I think it comes from a program and I know the college medical center used faxes to report STIs.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

When the fax machine at work finally breaks, we're not getting another one. There's simply no point of buying another one...because everything is scanned and emailed now.

I had to fax an invoice to our magazine distributor today because they shorted us one copy of Weight Loss Woman's World.

One. stinking. copy. Costs us $1.34 from the distributor. But corporate would have noticed and said something when our return next week didn't match what we sold and sent back.

The distributor would only accept shortage claims via fax. I had to traipse on over to pharmacy because they have one of the only two fax machines in the store.

[Andara Bledin]

Fax machines will not die in favor of email: Faxes come in once but can be checked by everybody who walks by. Email can either go to one person and hope they're in the office, or to more than one person and hope they don't duplicate everything - not a suitable replacement.

My company actually just swapped one of our fax lines to an email setup and, honestly, I think it's fairly asinine since the person that has that email leaves early and nobody checks her mail. >_< Even better, that line is the overflow for the main fax line, the one we kept, and the one that half of the orders people place with us still come in through.

Also, there are laws against people sending junk faxes - if we swap to an email solution (aka, nothing gets printed), then the "fax" lines will be clogged up with spam just like regular email. A good taste of that, and I'm sure people will be flocking back to a form of communication that is protected from unwanted receiving.

And for those of you that receive sensitive documents - why would you not already have a properly secured fax machine?

^-.-^

[Sapphire Silk]

I'm always getting asked to either fax or send a fax for something related to legal or work stuff. I have to explain I don't have a fax machine . . . people always act surprised.

Some will take scanned and emailed documents. But yesterday, I had to fax I-9 paperwork for my new part time job.

Luckily the bank offered to do it for me (I was there to get my SS card from my safe deposit box), and they didn't even charge me (which reminds me, gotta post on Praise for that).

I'll be glad when fax bites the dust.

[dalesys]

If you still have caveman tech (landline + modem in computer) you can send/receive faxes in Weenie-DOS...

[Andara Bledin]

There are also a few hundred programs out there that will fax documents straight from the computer if you have a line hooked up.

And, another reason why faxes are currently superior to the Internet: phone lines don't go down nearly as often as Internet connections. Which is another reason I will still be keeping my stupid land line, despite almost never actually using it.

^-.-^

[MoonCat]

Andara, we get junk faxes at work. Some company that runs seminars for managers on things like "how to fire an employee without violating labor laws," and other things like that. From what I can tell, management never goes for these, but they've never told the seminar company to stop sending them, either.

And we have a customer who not only insists on faxed proofs, we have to actually print his proof and fax it manually because his fax machine will not accept computer-sent faxes. I live for the day his fax machine bites the big one and he has to finally get one made in the current century.

[emax4]

I meant to put this in earlier. If he or the caller is so poor that neither can afford the few cents for a fax, the fax should be the LAST priority. The first priority should be getting a roof over the student's head.