Since email has largely replaced faxing in many businesses, it seems people are getting a little lax on their fax common sense and etiquette. Today a friend who is looking for a new job had a potential employer fax her some materials to my office. It was fine with me, but when the fax arrived, I instantly nominated the sender as the poster child for bad fax behavior. Why?
#1: There was no indication of how many pages were included in the fax. No cover sheet with the normal line, ”Number of pages, including cover sheet ___ ”. And no “1 of 6”, “2 of 6” etc on the pages, another very helpful indicator. Since it wasn’t one continuous article or report, with a definite beginning and end, I couldn’t tell if all the pages sent were actually received.
#2: There was no phone number for me to call to check on the number of pages. Was I supposed to fax back a sheet, “Received 6 pages. Please verify that this is correct.”?
#3: Some of the pages were forms, and the type was so small that I couldn’t read it. When I told my friend, she sighed, and said she’d bring over her two magnifying glasses. Experience, it seems, leads to preparation! But I doubt any magnifying glass will help with the black type in grey boxes. If you need to fax documents that contain very small type, enlarge them on your copier or computer before faxing, even if it means sending an extra page. Just run a page though the "copy" feature your fax machine, and see how it looks. You can be sure that after transmission, it will look worse on the recipient’s fax.
My friend doesn’t need a fax machine 99 days out of 100, and I’m about one paper jam away from pulling the plug on mine. So I decided to check out fax receipt by computer. Efax has many levels, and will give you free receipt of faxes (in your email) -- up to 20 pages a month. Their paid versions give you the ability to send faxes from your computer, receive your voicemails as emails, and they give you access to received faxes from any computer. MyFax also provides faxing by computer. They don’t have a free option, but their paid version is less expensive than eFax. Considering that both services even give you access to faxes on your PDA, it looks like the time for pulling the plug on the old paper jammer is here!
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