[Magdalen] Computer Question.

[Jim Guthrie]

> My gf, who has a dumbphone, emails them to herself via text
> message, then logs on and downloads them to her hard drive.
Reminds me of dealing with this installing a fax modem in my office c1987 (could 
it be almost 25 years ago?!?!?!).

The objection was that you could write all the memos and letter you like and 
send them, but couldn’t put a signature on them.

Easy Peasy -- send a copy of all the signatures you'd need in the office from 
someone else's FAX machine and then copy and paste into the document. Voila!

Of course, that was with a boss who insisted that he wanted a traditional FAX 
machine -- and spent a heap of money on a plain paper machine with all the bells 
and whistles (they were expensive then) AND, being as anal as he was, insisted 
it be in his office that was locked when he wasn;t around.

He got a "new" fax number, and the company fax remained on the PC at the 
reception desk. We forwarded everything the boss needed to see (menus, 
advertisements, stuff handled before he came in again, etc.) and more -- and our 
chief engineer went further and sent enough menus to his machine that it would 
run out of paper, which meant when he came in, there'd be menus (and ads) 
scattered around his office, with the paper out and when he'd put more paper in, 
it would crank up with all the backlog.

After awhile, he started turning the FAX off when he wasn;t going to be in the 
office.

Problem solved.

Then there was the time a boss (three jobs later) insisted that I send a fax to 
a customer every time they sent an error in an electronic document (requested by 
the customer's owner). This was a customer who thought they could do Electronic 
Data Interchange with a Word Macro -- one would need to be a genius.

I created a parsing program for their files, and every time there was an error, 
there was a new fax -- sent automatically. So they'd send a huge document and 
then the next morning, a new roll of wet-paper fax would be run out with huge 
stack of pages scattered around with more to come when they put the new roll in. 
The record was close to 2,000 faxes, sent one at a time from my auto-parser over 
a weekend.

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie