This may sound strange coming from a TechWhisperer, but I am not an early adopter. When it comes to technology (including cars and appliances) I like to wait until the bugs have been worked out before I make my investment. That being said, I love to read about bleeding edge technologies. I find it fascinating to watch new discoveries evolve and morph into products.
This is my way of saying that I am still using a single function printer. It prints on both sides, which I think is pretty darn cool. But all it does is print. I also have a fax machine from somewhere in the early 2000s which still works perfectly well. These two devices are the reason I don’t have a multi-function printer/fax/scanner. Yes, it would save space, but why replace what isn’t broken?
Sometime in the mid-’90s, a colleague of mine told me that fax technology was merely a diversion. He believed that email was where we should be focusing our attention and resources. He predicted that one day we would be sending documents through email and faxes would become obsolete. Well, he was partly right.
In the past week I have signed documents electronically and sent them off to a vendor via email. My paper files have shrunk dramatically as I store and backup my documents on my hard drive and in the cloud. I have been in business for almost 2 years and I am only now printing out my first invoice. All of the previous invoices were sent out via email. There are several instances where the invoices were paid entirely electronically, with no paper ever changing hands.
I also spent 30 minutes this week on the floor faxing what seemed like a ream of paper to my bank. To be fair, they did give me the option of scanning in the signed documents and either uploading them or sending them via email. And its not like I don’t have two scanners in my house. But the flat-bed scanners would require three steps. First I would need to scan in the information and then I would need to name the files and then attach them to emails.
The fax on the other hand was easy peasy. My fax is self-feeding, so all I did was sit there and feed paper into the machine. I had to sit there because my fax can only handle a few pages at a time. As I said, the bank wanted much, much more than that.
The funniest part is that the bank’s fax machine stored the incoming data electronically. Then it took a person to upload each file individually in their system. I know this because I was on the phone with the bank as the documents were popping up in the system.
I have lost track of my colleague, but I do wonder what he would say if he had seen me sitting on the floor in mid-2013 faxing off a ream of paper.