Comment by breppp
7 hours ago
Although I didn't enjoy this fiction of "angry man against system" genre, he did touch an important truth about the fax machine, which this story doesn't properly expand on.
A fax is very useful to bureaucracies because it is hard to prove a fax was ever sent or received at all. It might never arrived and wasn't retried, might have been printed as empty pages, maybe someone else picked it up.
This is why it is so useful when someone on the other end wants to delay (the equivalent of closing a bug as can't reproduce). This is why governments like faxes and why this story is so unlikely (no chance anyone will call back in that event)
Surely some of the online fax services are offering retention and certification of what's sent? Seems like free money to add a checkbox at checkout.
I was talking about the receiving end and at least in the context of this story we are talking about a fax machine, not some fancy document server. Point being that a fax has too many failure modes, which is a feature in these places
Yes, breppp is completely incorrect. Faxes are used specifically because they can do transmission verification and document evidence of verified successful transmission.
Online fax services that are used by medical or government offices almost always generate digital logs that track when a document was sent, who sent it, and who received it, for regulatory purposes