One of the guys in the production department, which is so pixelated with digital technology that I don't even think it has a fax machine anymore, was getting testy. A colleague was telling him that a client needed to fax something to our office. “Tell them if they need to fax it, they can just as easily email it as a PDF,” he said. And that was that, for he had decreed a no-fax zone.
Do people still use faxes? They pop up in publishing, the print-heavy industry in which I toil, or at least at our particular company, where insertion orders and registration forms still sometimes arrive over phone lines in bursts of screeches and static. Although more often, these orders and forms are signed, scanned on a newfangled copier and arrive to our inboxes as a tidy PDF, which most recipients then print anyway. So much for “saving a tree”; we’ve died of dysentery on the Paperless Trail.
I suspect also that large corporations and governments, both lovers of the bureaucratic paper trail and useless administrative positions to file said trail, are responsible in large part for keeping the fax from devolving to cassette tape or Polaroid camera status, hoarded and supported only by aficionados, hipsters and grandparents.
I recently spoke with a rep for the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, who’s a swell guy, and decided to welcome His Honor to keynote one of our real estate events. His scheduler insisted that we handle the invitation by fax. Requesting the mayor’s presence by speaking, as I’d just done, wouldn’t cut it. Nor would an email. I needed to wait for the scheduler to fax me a Request the Mayor’s Presence form, fill it out with a pen, then fax it back. Eventually and incongruously, a week later, someone emailed me to confirm that the mayor had agreed to speak at our event. What an archaic trail and trial.