Faxing

Email
January 26

Dear Sir

Catch 22. I needed to communicate with a building society in the UK. Their preferred method was post, but with snail mail being on strike this was not a good option. I couldn’t use a courier as the society uses only a PO Box address, which couriers cannot accept. They couldn’t give me a physical address, probably all working from home.

Anyone tried to find a fax service these days? Every business I know that used to offer the service no longer does because there is just no need. Correos do, but not for outside of Spain; same story with other businesses that I tried.

My notary could do it but needed a formal letter from me asking him to send it after he had read the contents! OK, but what a faff. I thought of emailing the documents to people I know in the UK for them to forward by fax, but as with Spain, they all asked why not email?

The building society will not normally use email because of security issues, though in the end they relented as a one-off. No, they cannot accept encrypted WhatsApp.

So, the fax is virtually dead, replaced by more modern technology.

This reminded me of my time with FedEx in the 1980s. Fax machines had just come onto the market but were very expensive and as rare as rocking horse droppings. Someone had the bright idea of installing fax machines in various of the company’s worldwide offices; this meant that we would send out a van to collect a document from a customer in say Bristol, and fax it to New York, whereupon it would be delivered to the recipient in another van.

It was a successful service but its very success brought about its demise because the purchase of large amounts of fax machines by FedEx brought the price of the equipment down significantly such that they became prevalent in many businesses.

Incidentally whilst with this company, we experienced email for the first time, which could initially only be used internally until the WWW made it ubiquitous.

Regards
Graham Shelton