One of the weirdest things about Everest is that when we sell something, despite the fact that
1) we use laptops at point of sale and could e-mail orders,
2) we have to log in to the company each night to update our machines and send them our days work,
3) they won't pay us any money until they have the actual contract in their hands,
despite these three things, they insist that as soon as we come out of a house with a contract, we have to fax them a copy.
Fax. FAX! Who in God's name still thinks fax is the modern way to transmit information?
So normally we leave a house and start looking for anywhere that might still have fax facilities. There aren't many.
But today I have unleashed a veritable maelstrom of modern technological practices and. by fair means or foul. have complied with their request without coming within 50 paces of a fax machine.
This is the route I took.....
1) Three seperate photo's of the three pages of contract were taken on my mobile phone.
2) These photo's were then sent by bluetooth to my laptop.
3) Having saved them as jpg's they were then inserted into an Open Office document and resixed to fill one page per photo, thus replicating the original A4 paperwork.
4) This new three page document is exported as a pdf file.
5) The pdf is uploaded to an online fax company.
6) The online fax company transmit my pdf as a fax to my business center.
7) A confirmatory email tells me the transmission was successful.
8) A text tells me they have received, read and registered the contract.
Not as simple as just faxing but for the trouble of finding a wifi connection in public it makes for a quicker process, in effect, than travelling back to the 1960's world of technology.
2 comments:
Fax is definitely an outmoded form of communication. The reason some companies still use it - and indeed why a fax is admissible as evidence in a court of law (I believe) - is that it has always been point-to-point transmission. ie, from one phone direct to another, without the possibility of it being intercepted and tampered with en-route, as is the possible case with email, say. I THINK that's right.
But well done you for finding a - somewhat circuitous - way round it!
I didn't think that there were any fax machines left! At least you don't need to send it by Telex.
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