Why The Bulletin kept its most-outdated device

By John Toth

The Bulletin

Do you still have a fax machine? We sort of do. Do you use it? We sort of do and don’t.

Why would anyone keep a fax machine around these days?

 Ours came in the form of an all-in-one printer that includes a fax function. We have had that printer for a long time, and it still works on cheap third-party ink just fine, so that’s why The Bulletin still has a fax machine.

We also have a fax number (1-866-844-5288). We used to have a dedicated land line just for the fax machine, but I canceled that, as it became obvious that the Internet was going to drive the fax-machine makers out of business.

We don’t really fax out all that many documents nowadays,  probably none - most months.

I have not canceled the fax service, because when I called the company, the representative was very good at talking me out of it. He offered a $5-per-month deal, and I bit the bait. Why not? It was worth keeping it for that much.

I always include our fax number in the ticket-giveaway drawing coupons, thinking that it’s probably just a waste of space. But who knows, there may be someone out there who would not enter the drawing, because they only have a fax machine and no Internet.

In this last drawing for Moody Gardens Palm Beach tickets, we received a total of one fax entry. Technically, we paid $5 to receive it, since it is unlikely that we’ll get another fax the entire month.

Before we proceed, allow me to review for readers who have never come in contact with a fax machine, what it is, what it does and how it does it.

A fax machine (short for facsimile) is a device that scans a physical document, converts the image into electronic signals and transmits them over telephone lines to another fax machine. The receiving machine then decodes these signals to print an exact replica of the original document.

It worked in a slower-paced, pre-Internet world just fine.

When not used for official business, our fax machine was busy sending other fax machines cartoons and receiving cartoons back. We had the one that worked by applying heat to waxed paper, in which it burned the images. They faded in a few months.

During a typical working day, The Bulletin fax machine sent  ad proofs to clients and received approvals or corrections.

One morning, it churned out a page-long fax from a photographer we contracted with, who expressed his detailed reasons for resigning. That piece of waxed fax paper faded many years ago, along with his comments on how disorganized and incompetent we were.

I agreed with the part about being disorganized, but we’re still here, approaching 32 years of publishing.

I hope he found other ways of expressing himself in his future endeavors. It would have been better to tell us that he was doing other stuff and would no longer be able to work for us. Some things should not be faxed or written down.

I have to tell you a positive fax machine story now to balance things out. One morning more than three decades ago, the fax machine turned on and kept printing out employment opportunity ads from a client that had only bought one or two ads at a time previously.

The ads filled a couple of pages and gave us enough cushion so that we would not have to worry about the cost of printing the next two issues. That was very welcomed at the time.

Dear reader, do you have a favorite fax machine story to tell? Send it to john.bulletin@gmail.com, and we’ll share it with our readers. Want to play with an old fax machine? Send your fax to our toll-free fax number, and I’ll fax you back. We’ll use up some of that $5 monthly service charge.