The oddest thing happened the other day. Someone asked me what my fax number was.
It kinda felt like they were asking where the livery stable was, or how much it would be to buy a buggy whip.
Sorry, I responded. We got rid of our fax line months ago.
Indeed, last spring my publisher and I used my wife’s truck to haul away a small mountain of obsolete tech gear to the recyclers, from long dead photocopiers to the fax machine. It was a good purge for the office, and this comes from a guy who doesn’t throw out much of anything.
We ditched the fax machine because, well, no one was using it. We only got a handful of faxes a month, but we were paying around $38 a month for a dedicated fax line. The number of faxes we were sending out in a year had dwindled to the point where you could count them on one hand. Time to go, the publisher announced, and there was no outcry in response.
The next printing of my business card was devoid of a fax number, but we added our Facebook and Twitter addresses.
In the nine months or so since the fax disappeared, this was the first inquiry I’ve had about it.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I sent a fax. The multifunction printer I got about three or four years ago has a built in fax. For a while, I had a phone line hooked up to it, but no longer. I never, ever use it in that capacity.
A long, long time ago, you had to buy fax software (remember that?) for your computer’s modem (that too?) to turn your computer into a fax. It was a glorious thing to send a fax directly from WordPerfect (what about that?). Then Windows incorporated faxing into its operating system, and all was right with the world, until it then stripped that capability out. I think current Windows once again has built-in fax capability, but I’ve never had the need to use it. Nor can I. The last time I had a modem built into my desktop computer, I think the calendar started with a 19. Maybe I could connect through my multifunction printer?
In their day, they were glorious things. We used to have a bin in the centre of the Battlefords New-Optimist newsroom where the front office staff would dutifully deposit all our press releases. I would dive into that before the editor, just to see what was happening RIGHT NOW, generally looking for press releases from the local Mounties. Then some day that just kinda ended, and I don’t think many people noticed.
I think I had set up my dad’s fax on an ident-i-call system. That was a service where SaskTel would assign different phone numbers, with different rings, to the same phone line. The service only cost a couple bucks more, but was a lot cheaper than a dedicated line. Cutting-edge, 1990s stuff, I tell ya!
Dad was a big fan of the fax machine, but he hasn’t mentioned it in a long time. And since he cut the cord and went to cellphone-only, I guess his fax is a dinosaur as well.
These days the closest thing I do to faxing is taking a picture of a document with my cellphone and emailing or messaging it.
Some people simply will not let their fax go, however. I get regular reports from a certain government ministry. Until just a few years ago, they would print off their report on their printer, scan it with their fax machine as if to send a fax, then email me the scan of the fax. Finally, after many moons of trying to deal with this madness, I impressed on them it’s easier to just send the original file, so I now get that as a .pdf.
Text recognition software is so good now, it makes all those images readable. I put the .pdf file through Adobe Acrobat, and viola, I can cut and paste!
Who mourns for the fax? Probably the same people who miss telegrams, and the teletype.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
