Wednesday, June 15, 2011

If fax machines could talk, they'd say - lose my number. Stat.

Right around tax time - my printer died. So, we went to buy one.

We wound up settling on a fax/printer combo. Mainly because the ink on the fax machine was killing me. And when I say killing me - I mean pissing me off. It was one of those machines that needed separate color cartridges. Even though it was only a fax machine. And I only sent faxes. Rarely received. But, every time you started the machine up - it would go through a cleaning cycle and use up all the colored ink.

Fast forward to yesterday. I needed to do some billing, and needed to fax a ton of stuff.

This is where I found out that my new HP fax/printer combo will not allow you to fax multiple documents from the glass bed, you could only fax multiple pages through the document feed slot. No big deal. Right?

Well the stuff I'm faxing (receipts) don't fare well going through the document feed slot. So I wound up having to send individual faxes. Around 20 of them. I only needed to send three faxes. Each of those faxes included five pages. The other five were resends.

This morning I woke up to the sound of the company I sent them to calling me. Three calls in fact, and an email. I wind up calling them and profusely apologising. And explaining why I was being such a retard.

Since I had waited to bill on the second of the last day I was able - I had to send another string of 30 individual faxes. Where I am sure that someone at that company promptly lost their minds. It's the last day of billing, so they are probably a wreck today. And I'm having to be a complete fup.

Something that should have taken me an hour max, took me 4 hours. And, I'm not happy about it.

30% of my brain is in conspiracy mode. They just want me to copy all these documents, so they will go through the feed. They just want me to buy more ink!

A funny thing about newly copied things. The paper is new, and so they don't easily go through the document feed either. The pages just all stick together.

Irritating. I would have used my old fax machine. I was trying to squeeze out all it's usefulness. It was out of magenta. I still think I might take a hammer to my old machine. Cause that shit pisses me off. Magenta, People!

I couldn't send a fax because of the color magenta.

4 comments:

  1. Ugh, what a pain in the butt!! I have one of those printer/fax combos at work, and I hate the damn thing.

    The old fax wouldn't do grayscale??

    :(

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  2. What the? Your geek cred has taken a serious hit now that I know you still have a landline. It's time for you to put Ma Bell out to pasture. I use send2fax and just treat them like email attachments, I think they charge me $5 a month, but it's worth the cost of ink alone just to convert my faxes into email. I feel for the business who must have received them. Half the time faxes are like old puzzles anyway. They either have too many pages or not enough.

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  3. Oh. Ruined it for you huh. It's good you found out now. ;) I'm back in the "questionable" category?

    Even worse, is they usually send an acknowledge letter for every fax. I hope someone catches that, and I don't get a snail mail box full of letters. That would be several dollars in stamps.

    Purplemagpie - No! Once it starts complaining about ink - it won't let you over ride the error. And why do I need ink to send a fax anyway? I have it set so it can't print sent fax acknowledgments.

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  4. Oooh! Your fax machine really gave you a headache! Well, I would also be upset if I were in your situation. Instead of helping you with your work, the machine gave you a lot more things to do. Urgh! Uhm, maybe it’s time for you to get yourself a new one so that you wouldn't have to encounter any more problems in the future.

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