Does anyone fax anymore?
Charles Apple just blogged about his vast business card collection and in my current role as VizEds ambassador and editorial consultant I have collected hundreds of business cards as well.
I also have spent dozens of hours entering contact information from these cards and I noticed that I never, I mean never ever, enter anyone’s fax number. I am not a faxer.
I neither send nor want to receive faxes and I just wonder if I am alone. Have we moved on? Is not faxing another one of those ‘generational” divides?
Why IS there a fax number on your business card? Wouldn’t your Skype, GMAIL, AIM, MSN or Yahoo! screen name serve you better?
I had to send a fax to PayPal the other day (To qualify the Visual Editors Foundation account to be properly classifed as belonging to a non-profit) and they insisted that the business could only be conducted via a fax.
Maybe faxing is important to lawyers and bankers but I could have just as easily scanned the tax documents as a PDF and emailed it to them. The paper on the other end is still coming out . . .
I suppose I could have used eFax to do exactly that same thing - but sending one fax a year doesn’t justify $16.95 a month. Got be a good steward of the non-profit’s resources.
I haven’t used faxes since the mid-90s when I was ordering illustrations by the dozen for the Chicago Tribune. But that was a dial-up era and, well, just about every step in the illustration business was analog.
Same thing with land lines - haven’t had one in the house in over seven years. That is not so uncommon but it does provide more evidence that different age groups communicate differently.
I am lucky in my work to be in regular contact with a wide-ranging age of contacts and have observed some key differences in getting things done.
Students will IM or SMS (called ‘texting’ in the U.S. and ‘SMS’ just about everywhere else) you before they will call you or e-mail you. And they might subscribe to your Twitter feed or Facebook feed before any of that. They are always using a mobile and only rarely do they make phone calls with them.
People a little younger than me like to Skype, and chat in a wide variety of IM clients. They are always on a laptop it seems. And they usually will have a conversation with me while also being involved in at least one other chat with someone else.
People around my age tend to communicate heavily through e-mail and I almost can’t get anything actually done with a baby boomer until I talk with them on the phone. I know I tend to use e-mail as a poor man’s chat machine. I may be a digital man, but I was an analog kid and some habits take longer to break.
That is my experience, what’s yours? Oh and, do you fax?
BTW here’s the best way to contact me.
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