Some of you who read this blog won’t know what a fax machine is. Or if you do, you might not have ever used one.
That fact both blows my mind and freaks me out.
When I first saw – and used – a fax machine, probably before most of you bastards were born, it was like I was in the presence of 28th century technology.
Sure we had phones that allowed us to talk to people anywhere in the World, but this was something that let you send words and pictures.
WORDS AND PICTURES!!!
DOWN A FUCKING PHONE LINE!!!!
IN REAL TIME!!!
AMAZING!!!
Now you might think things like email has made things both more efficient and more user friendly – and on one level you’d be right – but even though email doesn’t need special paper or give you an engaged tone or only let you send one page at a time [which you have to stand over to make sure it goes through], it also doesn’t let you get up to the same sort of mischief fax machines used to let you get away with … like printing a message on a few pieces of paper and then looping them together so they go through the fax machine over and over again resulting in some poor sap at the other end of the line getting pages upon pages upon pages of an obscene and inappropriate message.
Not that I ever did that. Oh no, that was Andy and Julian.
And email doesn’t let you ring your parents from an office in Australia because the company forgot to put the IDD security code on them.
Fax machines do. Well, some of them anyway.
I did do that, Multiple times. Sorry WPP.
So while fax machines may now appear like 18th century technology, they will always hold a special place in my heart because unlike modern technology, they weren’t user friendly or effortless to use, so every time I successful fed a document through it’s weird green glow, I got to feel like I ruled over the technology rather than the technology ruling over me … and while that might sound unbelievably sad, it’s better feeling a slave to the never ending flow of information, requests and demands.
Besides, when you work with tech that’s painful, you look for ways to ‘get one over on it’ which is why loop faxes and international phonecalls got to happen – at least that’s my excuse.
So here’s to the fax machine, one of the gems of technological evolution, even though it never quite received the credit it deserved.