I can be a bit of a technology hoarder. My office closet houses two filing boxes full of miscellaneous cords.
I own a VCR.
Although, to be fair, I recently purchased the VCR at a thrift store, so that I could watch a couple of childhood home videos and transcribe them to a digital format. But, still, I own a VCR.
And we won’t get into the flash drives and external HDD full of bits and pieces – old photos, creative writing, college schoolwork, miscellanea. They, at least, do not take up much room.
I’m also pretty sure I have a blackberry and several generations of brick-like smartphones tucked away.
Probably, somewhere, I have CDs and cassette tapes and maybe even a floppy disk.
I still have my old laptop from 2003. And my replacement laptop in 2009. And my replacement replacement laptop in 2013. (Current laptop is circa 2017 and still chugging along.)
After confessing all of this, I’m just waiting for the technology police to come around and visit.
Some of these things – old cell phones, defunct laptops and computer towers – I’ve tried to get rid of. I made it all the way out to the community hazardous waste collection event only to be turned away because they weren’t accepting e-waste. And some of them sit around because they are functional and storing useful information and yet I never take the time to actually retrieve their information and consolidate it into a modernized format.
My old iPod, the only storage container for the thousands of songs I ahem – “acquired” – in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, currently sits bedside on my clock-iPod player, the sole venue from which I can listen to my old playlists from college.
But actually I didn’t start this post to talk about all those things. I came here to talk about faxes.
And no, I do not own a fax machine.
But, I can send a fax.
I’d just like to take a moment and share the fact that when searching the internet for a free-to-use stock photo of a fax machine, this was the best I got:
Just in case any of you young’uns are confused, that is definitely not a fax machine. It is another technological relic from eras bygone, but, surprisingly, not one I am currently hoarding.
I actually have a very legitimate (to me) reason for owning a fax line.
When I started my business in 2011, it was a weird time, technology-wise. Part of verifying you were a real, honest-to-goodness enterprise involved having a land line to verify physical presence at your listed business address. And yet, this was also the boom of the smartphone — land lines were a dying breed. Businesses who did still have landlines were switching to VOIP (Voice Over IP, aka phone lines that use an internet connection) which, similar to cell phones, did not verify your physical address. Anyway, I was ultimately able to solve this problem with some extra paperwork, but my point here is that expectations were different 15 years ago.
One of the other things that added legitimacy to any business was a fax number. Similar to how the medical community hung on to faxes because they offered greater document security than an email attachment, there are various business dealings that could be conducted via fax. The physical fax machine was – even then – going the way of the dinosaurs, so what I acquired was an e-fax number. Scan the documents to your computer, upload them to the fax webpage, and send/receive via your online account.
Nowadays, with all the secure messaging systems in place, even businesses and doctor’s offices don’t need faxes. You can, of course, still choose to send a fax. I sent one last month, in fact.
And that’s not to say that I don’t still receive faxes, on my e-fax line.
I received a handful of faxes those first couple of years. But for the past 5 years, I get faxes from only one sender. It’s the same fax, every time. They have been sending me this fax, once a month, for at least the last 7 years:
I’m not sure if I should admire their persistence, or laugh at their staunch refusal to give up such an outdated venue for advertising.
And yes, I realize that I could just call the number on the bottom of the flyer and get it stop.
But a small part of me enjoys the brief flash of nostalgia. That feeling of receiving a fax, even if receiving a fax was never really the highlight of my day. And also, there aren’t a lot of things in this world that stay the same for almost a decade. But this silly flyer – it’s the same. It’s there waiting to greet me in my inbound fax folder, once a month, every month, with the same basic lettering and grainy fax-transcribed photos and Would I Like a Free Quote?
They have a dream, this WANTED! ALL TYPES OF VEHICLES AND EQUIPMENT. They have a hope that their persistence in the face of adversity, in the face of technological obscurty, may some day pay off.
Never give up that hope, WANTED!
May we all be as persistent in our dreams as that person sending a fax in 2023.
