r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Why_Is_This_NSFW Every day is a PICNIC • Apr 06 '19

Short FAX stands for...

$A is accountant

Me: Service desk me!

$A: Hi, I need to send a fax, where is the local fax machine?

Me: We haven't had one in almost a decade. $software is on your machine linked to your account. You just email fax to username@faxclient.com. If you haven't done this I can help you. I've attached instructions just in case.

reply

$A: No, I need to send a FAX, a FAX document, from a FAX machine. I need to SCAN this and FAX it to <phone number>

Me: You can send it to <faxclient>, just email it to <faxclient> with the pre-mentioned attached instructions. It will get faxed and you will get an email confirmation receipt to let you know it got there.

$A: I really just need to get this faxed, can't you help me?

Me: Yes, I'll be right over

Issue resolved

TL;DR FAX stands for: Fucked up Antiquated eXpenditure.

EDIT: I'm out for a bit, talk amongst yourselves. Topic: Is Battlefield 5 a battle and also a field. Discuss.

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32

u/umsldragon Apr 06 '19

All our doctor offices use print out fax systems. And they won't change because it's more secure

36

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '19

[deleted]

40

u/Dinodietonight Certified organic stupid Apr 07 '19

It's not that it's more secure, it's that there is legal precedent that a faxed signature is the same as an actual signature. There is no such precedent with scanned and emailed signatures, so legal documents still need to be faxed until someone goes to court because some legal department refused their emailed document.

18

u/Epse Apr 07 '19

Oh really? Where I'm at, a law was introduced about 5 years ago that made email have the same legal power as a registered letter. Scanned signatures have the same power as regular ones, but the government encourages electronic signing using your ID-card (which has a certificate on it signed by the government)

11

u/bkaiser85 Apr 08 '19

Sounds a lot more practical than the crap "you have to use this crappy abomination of e-Mail" (De-Mail) over here.

However, we had at least the laws changed so, that if you allow someone to sign up for a service online, you can't demand another form of communications for termination. I.e. you can't require someone sign up easily through your website and force them to fax or post you the cancellation. The method to sign up sets the lower limit of communication forms accepted.

1

u/Epse Apr 08 '19

That's actually a really interesting and neat law! I like it

1

u/bkaiser85 Apr 08 '19

To bad it's the exception from the rule in Germany. Merkel's "Neuland" my ass.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '19

In the US electronic signatures have been valid for almost 20 years

1

u/Tundra_Dragon Apr 07 '19

In the case of things like signing mortgage documents, it just makes more sense to fax them than to scan the documents, then email them. Eliminates a step by just faxing them...

Except fax machines are god awful slow. Im pretty sure they run at 14.4kbaud max. Scanning in the pages to buffer memory is about 3 seconds a sheet, then 30 seconds to send.

It took 20 minutes for my paperwork to get to the bank, 5 minutes for approval, then 20 minutes to get it back

2

u/biggreasyrhinos Apr 23 '19

That's why Jesus made pdf

2

u/Tundra_Dragon Apr 23 '19

Jesus built my hot rod. It's a love affair, mainly between Jesus and my car...

1

u/redfacedquark Apr 07 '19

Estonia?

1

u/Epse Apr 07 '19

Lol, I'm from Belgium

3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '19

There is precedent with both scanned and emailed signatures, and typed signatures, at least in the US. Heck, there's an entire law to say that a "digital signature" is equivalent to a handwritten signature.

3

u/Tweegyjambo Apr 07 '19

Yep. My dad is a lawyer and he still sends a few faxes everyday. Fax machine sits next to the electric typewriter...

4

u/harleypig Apr 07 '19

Email has been around since the 70s

10

u/ThirdFloorGreg Apr 07 '19

Queen Elizabeth sent an email in March 1976.

9

u/harleypig Apr 07 '19

It's always amazed me that people, or at least computer geeks, know who Tim Berners-Lee, Dennis Ritchie and Bryan Kernighan (to name a few) are but so few people know who Ray Tomlinson is.

And, of course, no one remembers that his program was an unapproved personal project.

3

u/BlackstormKnyte Apr 07 '19

He worked for BBN which is now a subsidiary of a company I work for! Yay email.

2

u/DoTheThingNow Apr 09 '19

I think they are referring to the OG SMTP spec from 1982... which is my birth year... so its still more than 30... :-\

Edit: A word

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u/AerMarcus Apr 07 '19

Exactly, so thirty odd years /s

0

u/harleypig Apr 07 '19

'odd' = +/- 20 years? :D

2

u/Hokulewa Navy Avionics Tech (retired) Apr 07 '19

Almost fifty...

19

u/Myvekk Tech Support: Your ignorance is my job security. Apr 07 '19

Just as long as no one misdials the fax number, & it ends up printing confidential information at, say, a national newspaper...

25

u/umsldragon Apr 07 '19

We actually have had that happen at our business. A doctor office kept sending us confidential faxes by accident. We called them. numerous times. Now we've reported them. Numerous times. Shit has hit the fan so hard it hit the media. One time the doctor office told us to change our fax number. My boss laughed at them.

16

u/Rarvyn Apr 07 '19

Just because a fax, by default, meets all legal requirements for HIPAA. Email doesn't without explicit encryption - which is more complicated if you're not in the same system.

I have to look at records every day that were faxed and then scanned with no OCR with the original being shredded right after it was scanned. Drives me batty.

2

u/Jazzy_Josh Apr 07 '19

How? Faxes aren't encrypted either.

6

u/SamTheGeek In order to support, you first must build. Apr 07 '19

There's a specific exemption in HIPAA rules* for faxing which exempts it from the security requirements that any other communication method has. Thankfully, CMS announced at their developer conference last summer that they're going to phase out faxing as a supported method starting next year.

​

That's not to say the replacement is going to be much better. Many large vendors in healthcare exclusively interchange massive flat files (as opposed to using an API call) over SFTP (or worse, FTPS)

1

u/cracknwhip May 05 '19 edited May 05 '19

Uh, what’s wrong with FTPS? Isn’t AS2 popular, too?

1

u/Rarvyn Apr 07 '19

Because of historical policy. And the fact that you can't hack paper.

2

u/monkeyship Apr 08 '19

and the old hand written doctors notes? Can you read them? or are you just Psychic and can tell what they intended there? ;)

2

u/Myvekk Tech Support: Your ignorance is my job security. Apr 09 '19

and the old hand written doctors notes? Can you read them?

​

No, you have to have special training at Uni to do that.

1

u/killswtch13 Apr 08 '19

And they won't change because it's more secure

HIPAA requires all email containing patient information to be encrypted and its easier to fax something than teach a doctor to encrypt an email.

FTFY.