Against Fax Machines

Fax machines hate me. Why? What have I done to them? Composing the letter below took 15 minutes, including reading the bills in question. (I wrote to Hilary and Chuck about the Senate version of the bill). Getting the fancy copier/fax machine to actually send these letters to my voices in Washington took 45 minutes.

And I never did get the letter to Hilary sent.

The worst was when I accidently entered the voice number for Chuck's office rather than the fax. I could hear his staff assistant on the speaker on the copier, but couldn't find anything I could speak into to apologize to him. Then for some reason the automatic redial decided to work (it hadn't before). The copier/fax called Chuck Schumer's staff assistant three times.

The following things failed to stop the copier/fax from redialing.

Hitting Stop
Hitting Clear
Logging out of my account.
Turning the copier off.

That's right. Turning the copier off did not stop it from redialing. I tried to unplug the copier/fax, but in a very 2001ish moment, the machine kept on dialing. I realized the plug I pulled was for the card reader and not for the machine itself. At this point I was convinced the copier/fax was going to start talking to me: "I'm very dissapointed in you, Dave." Then, for no reason, it stopped.

I think I made every faxing mistake possible during the 45 minutes I wrestled with the fax. I entered the fax number wrong. I entered a voice number instead of a fax number. I forgot to enter my department's budget code. Whenever I entered something wrong, the automatic redial worked. Whenever I entered everything right, but the line was busy, the automatic redial didn't work.

And I was supposed to get real work done today.

I feel totally defeated by office technology.