Thursday, May 15, 2008

The ancients and their fax machines...

Personally, I don't understand people that still use the fax. It truly denotes a lot of stupidity on their part, when email is soooooooo much better.

Email is so much easier :
  • to store
  • to copy
  • to search
  • to send/receive
  • to categories
  • to forward
  • the service is 99.99% available

And who can be so stupid to use the fax? At least the following: the Romanian Pu(b)lic Administration. Unfortunately, they're not alone: there are other idiots that use it (like, Grupul de Presa Roman, aka, Romania Libera).

When I hear of an organization that uses the fax, a bell rings - this clearly has quite a few employees that are there just to slow down a process.

Unfortunately, you do need to deal with idiots now and then. I used to be very pissed before, since I don't have a fax and had to go to the Post Office to send faxes.

Well, finally, I'm using www.efax.com to send my faxes online. They haven't payed me for advertising, I'm just happy they exist - I've sent a few faxes using their service, and amazingly, it works. Just one less stress for me :)

4 comments:

Lucian Ciufudean said...

1. What if you have a file with 20 printouts inside you want to send? If not for the fax, you'd have to scan, OCR, email them and the receiver will have to print and file them

2. The internet is still very expensive in Africa for example.

At least while many of the official papers are stored in hard copy, the fax will haunt you.

John Torjo said...

@lucian

1. Today's multifunctional printers have very good scanners (with page feeders as well - where you can put a multi-page document in one step) and are really cheap. Mine costed about 500 usd (and it's an HP!)

About OCR - really you don't need this. When scanning, you can scan the whole doc as a single pdf.

And as for the receiver, it's much easier to store the doc electronically. And if he wants to print it, it's really easy, and yo don't lose any of the document's quality as you would if you were to fax it.

Not to say about - the fax number can be occupied, or, noone might answer the fax, or, sending the fax fails, and you need to resend it - let me know how that feels for a 20-page document.

2. Sorry about Africa - I forgive those folks ;)

3. As many of the official papers are stored in hard copy - well, again, you need to be an idiot to prefer fax over email at that - since either way, you don't get the original document, you get a *copy* of a certain document. And yes, that fits the Romanian Public Administration like a glove.

Best,
John

Marian Neagul said...

A fax might be useful because:
1. Any decent Secret Service should be able to intercept it.

2. Not all users are able to use computers, and sending an email might be really complicated.

3. I don't really like the idea to use MIME messages for any type of attachments!

John Torjo said...

@marian

2. sending an email might get really complicated? Common man, everybody knows how to send an email - that's really no excuse. If we extrapolate, not everybody knows how to use fax, so will we downgrade to using the Post Office? Not to say, that the no of email addresses beats the no of faxes BY FAAAAAAAR.

3. I'm not sure what you mean.

Best,
John