Fax Fever : From Business Tool to Homework Aid to Monkey Business, the Machine’s Taken Over
Why are all those Beverly Hills home fax machines purring away late at night? Stockbrokers passing hot tips on to blue-chip customers? Movie execs swapping script outlines into the night? Foodies sending finicky take-out orders to their favorite delis?
Would you believe homework?
According to fax machine providers, Westsiders who own the devices and have teen-agers (who understandably wish to remain anonymous) are likely to have their machines tied up at night with school assignments being faxed back and forth.
Parental Approval
And even those kids who do their homework unassisted are eager to use faxes to create electronic study groups--with parental approval. “My daughter is just waiting for somebody in her class to have a parent bring a fax machine home,” said Bill McCue, president of Public FAX in Orange. “They always forget stuff . . . she’ll call up a girlfriend and try to figure out how to do math problems. You ever try to do math over the phone?”
It’s all part of the growing fax consciousness. Initially introduced as a business tool, facsimile machines--which send and receive documents over telephone lines in seconds--are suddenly being employed for an expanding array of personal uses: everything from playing chess to executing practical jokes to sending holiday greetings to locating missing children.
Not only has the abbreviation fax made it into Webster’s, the number of fax machines in the country has grown to 1.7 million, according to estimates of analysts at San Jose’s Dataquest, a high-tech market research and consulting firm. As most of those machines are still in offices, business applications are also expanding rapidly and becoming far more creative.
Doctors now routinely fax prescriptions to pharmacies. Fire department personnel fax blueprints of buildings to fire fighters at fire sites. And high-tech bill collectors now have a lightning-quick retort for deadbeats who claim they lost or didn’t receive an invoice in the mail: They fax a new one immediately and it gets there in less than a minute.
Some observers claim the most innovative business application to date is intra-office faxing. “What we’re starting to see at a lot of companies is people faxing one desk to another,” said Ray Jeter of Just the Fax, an Irvine-based chain of fax retailers.
At AST Research, also in Irvine, employees frequently fax documents to each other rather than using messengers to deliver them. “We have regular mail clerks, but facsimile is so much faster,” enthused Ron Place, office services supervisor. “We’re spread out across two or three buildings . . . altogether in excess of half a million square feet . . . I don’t know how we lived without (fax machines) before.”
Fax has also enlivened the formats of radio stations eager to court those who listen at the office (especially since the Arbitron ratings were recently expanded to monitor office listening habits). Numerous stations have invited audiences to communicate with deejays via office fax machines. Some, such as WMMR in Philadelphia, have even asked listeners to “fax us your body parts.”
That sport showed up recently on the sitcom “Murphy Brown,” when the TV reporter played by Candice Bergen explained her absence from the office Christmas party, saying, “The memory of last year’s party is still fresh in my mind. Perhaps you heard about it. I drank all the punch and faxed my chest to the West Coast.”
On KABC’s “Ken & Bob Co.,” a high-rated, morning drive-time show, listeners have been instructed to fax in such things as stupid instructions that accompany products. The fax format became so popular the duo formed a special club for waxing silly with office listeners via fax.
But is this what the fax revolution has come to? Charter membership in Ken and Bob’s “Nine O’Clock Fax Club”?
“You don’t buy a fax machine to phone in trivia to a radio station or to order a ham and rye at a deli,” contended McCue, who, as an industry consultant and publisher of a directory of 5,000 public fax stations, is sometimes called the “guru of fax.”
“You buy it for a business use, then that expands. People who buy fax machines become enlightened--and addicted. They start using it in ways they never imagined.”
Indeed, faxaholics are multiplying at such a frenetic rate that some experts predict the medium is likely to beat out the computer as the next major contraption to link up the entire world.
Stephan Schwartz, chairman and research director of the Los Angeles-based Mobius Society, has sent fax communication “all over the world” since the 1970s, when the medium was slow and commercially known by the name Qwip. Lately, Schwartz said he’s been sending faxes between the United States and the Soviet Union to speed up a number of citizen diplomacy projects in which he’s involved.
Even Into Soviet Union
“There aren’t many fax machines yet in the Soviet Union but I think the Soviets are going to embrace the technology with great gusto. . . . We’ve sent pictures, maps, charts, spread sheets . . . letters,” said Schwartz, whose organization is best known for such projects as psychic-assisted archeological digs. “You can send anything you can photocopy. The fax is like a little space bridge.”
Not only do fax machines transmit drawings and photographs (minus a few half tones), they’re notoriously easy to operate. (Basically, you insert a piece of paper and punch in a phone number.) What’s more, prices have come down; you can now purchase a fax machine for as little as $600, up to $2,500.
They’re hot, convenient, easy to use and increasingly affordable. Is it any wonder that fax machines are now affecting people’s lives from the cradle to the grave?
McCue observes that a Klamath Falls, Ore., public fax outlet “does a husky business with local morticians with a need to get interment papers signed rapidly.” And on New Year’s Day, one of his Public FAX employees gave birth to a baby at 1:30 p.m. After the baby’s footprints were recorded, they were faxed to Carbondale, Ill., to the baby’s great-grandparents, who received the prints within an hour of the birth.
Judi Kaufman, who sometimes advises corporate clients on “fax etiquette” as a part of the services of her gift-buying firm, would no doubt approve.
Kaufman, however, generally cautions against sending faxed greetings and thank-you notes--unless the spontaneity of the medium is warranted by the circumstances.
“The only way faxed thank-you notes are effective is if they’re sent back immediately after receiving a gift delivered by courier,” said the owner of Beverly Hills-based Judi Kaufman & Co. “It has to work with the nature of the gift.”
Care Advised
Kaufman also advises users to be careful when punching in fax numbers.
“I got an entire musical score faxed in from New York by mistake,” said Maxine Weinman, owner of Maxine’s Seafood Cafe in Hollywood, where about 20% to 30% of take-out orders come through her “Fax It to Max” service.
More than a few of Max’s faxes look like mistakes but prove to be orders, Weinman added. One order came completely in drawings: a fish and a sword for swordfish, a fish in a cage for Cajun fish. Another order (featuring a drawing of a large apple, a piece of cheese and a piece of cake) momentarily stumped the restaurant crew. “We finally figured out it was for New York cheese cake,” Weinman said.
Weinman reports she enjoys the communications from her creative faxers and doesn’t mind the inconvenience of an occasional mix-up, because her take-out orders are processed more accurately and efficiently than they would be if taken by phone.
But Kaufman warns that wrong numbers on fax deliveries could result in “state of the art faux pas.”
IRS Tax Notices Sent
Consider the temporary terror a local shopkeeper experienced when an IRS audit form crossed her fax machine and she assumed it was meant for her. (She later discovered her husband had told a client to send him a copy of the form on his wife’s fax machine but neglected to tell her it was coming.)
“Twice this week, people have faxed me confidential information that was intended for somebody else,” Kaufman said. Another phenomenon she sees more and more is the snobbery of fax-haves vs. fax-nots.
“Especially in Los Angeles, there’s a group who thinks that if you don’t have a fax you’re out of the loop of business,” she observed. “For small, entrepreneurial companies in a tight financial market, it’s a difficult issue to handle.”
Public FAX’s McCue points out, however, that “the poor man’s fax is a $10 decision to use a public fax station. When people say to (a faxless person), ‘What’s your fax number?’, the person . . . can give the fax number of a public station. And no one’s the wiser.”
Solved His Embarrassment
Jack Nilles, senior research associate at the USC School of Business Administration’s Center for Effective Organizations, recently solved his embarrassment over faxlessness by getting a machine. “I was getting several calls a week where people would say, ‘I’ll fax you this.’ Fortunately they couldn’t see my face turn red over the phone,” Nilles said.
Nilles is one who suspects fax communication will beat out computer networking among offices and individuals who’ve absolutely, positively got to have it there faster than overnight.
“I’ve been watching this for the last 10 years, to see if electronic (computer) mail or fax machines are going to win,” he said. “In the interim, it looks like fax will beat out electronic mail.”
Dataquest’s Greg Carlsted agrees. “The growth of facsimile is superior to E-mail (electronic computer mail) at this point,” he said. In Carlsted’s opinion, that’s because people have become more and more aware of faxing, prices of the machines have decreased and standardization is allowing different types of machines to talk with one another.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Sara Kiesler, who for seven years has researched the social effects of electronic mail and other electronic exchanges of information, expects a swift merger between electronic mail and fax.
“I think they will be so integrated in the near future that you won’t be able to distinguish one from the other,” said Kiesler, who is a professor of social sciences and social psychology. “(Asking which medium will dominate) is almost like saying ‘Will television beat movies?’ We have VCRs now. How can you distinguish?”
Which Are Fakes?
Meanwhile, with the growth in faxed communications, it’s becoming increasingly tough to distinguish between genuine documents and fakes.
Rand Corp. researcher Tora Bikson, a consultant to a United Nations task force studying electronic transferal of information, points out that the dramatic increase in fax use is raising all sorts of questions for organizations. Among those being studied at the U.N.: “How do organizations . . . control or document the use of fax? How do they distinguish between what’s official communication and what’s not?”
As practical jokers have found, less-than-perfect fax reproduction of documents makes the medium appealing for forgeries of all kinds. An Indianapolis car salesman tells of what happened when he accidentally left a set of family photos behind at one car dealership before moving on to another. One of his former colleagues cut the photos apart so that the salesman’s head was atop the body of his young son, sitting nude in a bathtub.
“It was my second day on the new job when the picture came over the fax,” Rick Moonshower recalled. “All of a sudden the women upstairs came down the stairs laughing. The photo had a note saying, ‘Ladies, I’d like you to meet your new employee.’ ”
Personal Notes
Other personal missives are not so much obscene as they are simply annoying. At Berkeley-based Ten Speed Press and Celestial Art publishing houses, publicity director Dayna Macy bemoans the fact that the organization receives daily faxes from “a set of authors who shall remain nameless.”
“We get seven-page faxes from them, 10-page faxes; they faxed their Christmas card to us. We pay for all this paper,” Macy said.
“This stuff makes people feel efficient, like they’re doing something. And you can’t hide from it anymore. They’ve got you by phone, by Federal Express and the last bastion--they’ve got you by fax,” she sighed. “You can’t even hide under your desk anymore. There’s a fax on top of it.”
