Faxing

I just got my coworker to help me fax a document to Canada.

I hate fax machines. The fax machine at my first job was my nemesis (possibly because you had to feed the pages in manually as it would not accept large "chunks"). Another job involved me faxing newspaper articles to various media monitoring agencies.

So you can imagine how much I hate faxes.

I do not understand this fax machine. I have trained several printers and we share a mutual respect. When I press "print document now", I expect that document to come out into my greedy little hands. And in return, it expects me to change the toner, retrieve errant pages and generally treat it with love and respect as befitting a half-tonne piece of machinery.

Yes, call me the "printer whisperer".

So yeah, I hate fax machines. And I don't understand how this one works, if it senses my discomfort, or this is merely an excercise in cross-cultural/cross-species communication.

As far as I know, to send a fax, the person has to pick up the phone receiver and repeatedly dial 310. 310. 310. 310. 310. I overheard the voice on the other end. It's a voice I'm all too familiar with, after trying to place call upon call without realising that I needed a 256 prefix. Also, after buying a shoddy phone card. Let's just call it the Romanian equivalent of "Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again. This is a recording" 2CY".

So Vali is trying over and over again to do...what? I don't know. Finally, we get a dial tone or something. And the machine beeps. And beeps again. He nods at me.

Victory is ours (or more precisely, the Canadian Medicare system, as my health insurance is now officially extended).