On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 06:31:26PM -0600, tom wrote:
[...]
Don't forget Fax Machines! Not prevalent now, but
still in use.
Perhaps in the USA with its free local calls, but they were never that popular
in the UK where all calls are metered[0], and they're obsolete now. Also, the
vast majority of our phone lines are mobiles, and it's rather hard to fax from
one of those![1]
In my conslutting travels, I have a handful of clients who requested timesheets
or other documentation to be faxed to them, but they were as much an outlier as
the one that wanted triplicate carbon copies posted to them. Also notable was
that they often had 08xx premium-rate fax numbers, which gives away their true
motivation.
Finding a still-working fax machine to send the damn things is such a chore I
tend to just print out a copy and drop it in the post. I'm happy to wait a day
or two for Royal Mail to do their bit.
UK law doesn't require hard-copy document exchange, and I've formed substantial
B2B contracts just fine via email. The only time I am legally required to send
hardcopy is as part of the pre-action protocol when I'm suing somebody who owes
me money. The suing itself though has gone online!
[0] These days, the price is often 0p/min, or at some nominal expensive rate
that's discounted 100%.
[1] The networks still supported it when I last tested it, but that was a while
ago when I last owned a phone that could initiate a (HS)CSD call. I'm not
sure if the capability was completely lost when we migrated from GSM to
UMTS.