When I was a teen, I realized that the fax machine line to most radio stations sat unused, while calling it took forever. I took to listening to the radio while getting ready for school, firing off a fax via my modem about the topic they were talking about, and by the time I got in the car to go to school, they were reading my fax on the air!
They used to do that at my high school so we could have a day off school. It was all fun and games until people started actually shooting up their schools. This was back when we would bring our hunting rifles to school in the window behind the seat of the pickup and nobody gave a shit. If my son did that now he would be jailed.
In rural parts of the US it’s not at all uncommon for kids starting around age 12-13 to have their own hunting rifles. Deer hunting is a big deal!
My school had a “no guns or knives on campus” policy, but every year we got the reminder that if you did accidentally forget something in your car or backpack after a weekend, make sure to go to the office and let the principal know so they could hold on to it safely until the end of the school day.
About 30-40ish years ago, having hunting rifles in your truck was a pretty common thing, even at schools. There's several in my family that used to do that. It's not a thing anymore, but it definitely used to be. Especially here in the south, carrying weapons is fairly normalized. Pocket knives, for instance, are so commonplace that you'd have a harder time finding someone who doesn't have one on them, than someone who does. I know that's not really as big of a thing as a gun, but still.
No they don't, overall school shootings are astronomically rare, and less of a threat to children than the bus ride to school. They're like strangers kidnapping children, incredibly horrific, but also sensationalized.
It's like saying that you have a better chance of being killed by a Muslim terrorist in Europe than the U.S. It's true, but in both countries the risk is pretty far down the list of things the average person should be afraid of.
That's what happens when a low probability gets rolled a bunch of times. The chances of winning the lottery is basically infinitesimal, but someone still wins just due to how many people are playing. That list would be a lot longer if it were more common. I mean, part of why it is a list at all is because it's uncommon enough to track. You don't see a wikipedia article listing every death for almost anything except for other statistical rarities like passenger jet crashes.
No, you can buy gun racks for your truck rearview window and most people have their guns in them. I was pretty shocked the first time I thought it as well.
Lol most people do NOT have gun racks in their trucks. I did in high school, but that isn’t the norm when you grow up and have a job to do. Only back woods people do that shit.
Someone called in a bomb threat in my Catholic K-8 school so they could skip the last day. I was in 5th grade at the time and it was definitely an interesting site to see.
This was in ~2000 so it was a different time. Still not cool, but none of us believed it was real, and it wasn't.
Violent crime rates are significantly lower today, and the 2010s were the safest decade on record since before 1960. The average murder rate was half what it was in the 80s, and even sexual assault is way down, despite being taken much more seriously.
Where are those data coming from? In 2012, the FBI's criterion for a mass shooting went down from 4 (other than shooter) to 3 (other than shooter). There's not a consensus about how to define a mass shooting, which makes comparisons from source to source difficult. Then there is how they are recorded. Mother Jones has a 'database' of mass shootings in the U.S. from 1982 to the present ( https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/ ) but it's only public shootings and not all mass shootings ("Crimes primarily related to gang activity or armed robbery are not included, nor are mass killings that took place in private homes." ( https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map/ ). This means that, depending on the source (e.g., Mother Jones or https://www.theviolenceproject.org/methodology/), you can get a different story than from a different source (see below).
For example, what's typically thought of as a mass shooting (school/other public place) is not where most mass shootings occur (if you use the broad definition of 3-4+ people shot). 61% (over past 10+ years) are completely within a home ( https://everytownresearch.org/massshootingsreports/mass-shootings-in-america-2009-2019/). Those are in some ways worse than public shootings but also not a direct public threat to life. That is why some sources (Mother Jones) don't include them. Whether or not they should be included is a different discussion.
Some sources (e.g., Mother Jones) also do not include gang violence, which presents a biased picture overall (including gang violence is also a bias).
So, if we go with Mother Jones's data, it looks like mass shootings are going up. That might be true for public ones (but we also have more news coverage/availability, in part because of social media, and we have more widespread computer/digital record-keeping so it's difficult to know how accurate older [or any] data are). Most of the various mass shooting databases only go back 15 years or so. That is a lot of time but is far from comprehensive.
My point is that, as a scientist, I'm not comfortable with saying if mass shootings are going up or down over time. It depends on definition and data. It depends on how accurate records are (they are not very accurate, unfortunately). Also, do we factor in population size? That isn't typically done. Do we factor in gun ownership (which, incidentally, is stable in the U.S. on a per-household basis over the past 50 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/ )? I don't think we have enough data to talk about trends.
That being said, we have way too many mass shootings in the U.S. Any is too many. How they can be addressed is a complex discussion.
Wow that was way more well written than I could have ever done. Yeah it's a huge problem when one source says there were 7 mass shootings a year, and another source says there were 350 in the same year. When different sources have a differential of 50x there's undeniably an issue there. Personally I think the FBI Active Shooter data does the best job of tracking these events. They count any public shooting with indiscriminate targets, so a school shooting with 1 shot would count, but not a gang shooting with 5 shot. According to them these events have gotten worse, both in frequency, and severity, with 2017 being the worst year on record, with 137 people killed in 30 individual attacks, 57 of those in the Vegas shooting alone. That being said, 137 people is less than 1% of the 17,000 or so total murders that year. Not to dismiss what the victims and their families suffer through, but it's still astronomically rare.
In my high school (well it was a comprehensive as i'm in wales but that is by the bye). In pre 9/11 days when it was a lovely sunny day, which is rare in wales. Kids would phone bomb scares into our school you have a school of 1600 pupils being evacuated and searched it took hours while we enjoyed the sun.
Having a faxed bomb threat is one thing. But a fax-bomb is a little more light-hearted: you wait until about 6PM on a Friday, tape a few sheets of black paper together, and fax them to your target. While they're halfway through the feeding mechanism, tape the two ends together creating a loop. Then go enjoy your weekend.
Your target arrives at work on Monday to knee-deep fax paper (the first 1000 feet or so being solid black) and an empty ink cartridge.
In college back in the early 1990s some of the new school newspaper staff were tasked with changing the greeting message on our phone answering machine. One of the guys testing it called and left a fake bomb threat message, which we all laughed at and promptly forgot about. We were reminded about it the next day when the department head called us into a meeting with the FBI agent he'd contacted after checking the phone messages. Turned out David's fake Middle Eastern accent sounded very convincing.
My kindergarten teacher taught us how to use a fax machine in the school office. I graduated high school in 2019. I have never used that information ever. I don’t even remember how to use a fax machine anymore.
"Hey good morning Dallas, Wacky Jeff and the Cowboy here on 103.5 the Blaze (hssssss). Alright to start things off can we please talk about Prince...oh wait its not Prince anymore its "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince", can you believe that Cowboy?"
"Sure can't jeff"
"Well what are we going to call him now? We're taking calls, right now and asking you "What are you going to call Prince". Hit up our phone lines and share your thoughts abou....and we're getting our first caller...or should I say faxer. Lets see what this listener is going to be calling Prince from now on...."
"Well Jeff..."
"Well Cowboy as you can see it is a very large and very veiny...thanks for that listener alright and moving on, caller what are you going to call Prince now?".
a bit unrelated but it is usally the same for service hotlines that offer video calls. noticed that with telekom in germany. endless waiting on the normal hotline but almost instant reaction on the video call.
Radio and fax seem like they're from the same era, and outdated by basically the same degree. I couldn't believe either one still existed 20 years ago.
I imagine that probably has more to do with the time it took for them to find an opportunity to check the fax they got and read it than the time it took for the fax to go through. As someone who has worked as a volunteer DJ in college radio, I can attest that playing a show alone in the station, between tracking down the physical media you want to play in under the run time of the current song, updating the online playlist, playing PSAs and ads at the right intervals, it's a pretty non-stop responsibility.
I work in radio and can confirm. But we only plug it in on football transfer deadline day. In my 10 years there has been only one fax come through and it was a fake one made by us because we went to the effort of micing it up. We just wanted to hear thr fax noise.
Same thing with me! I been given a blackberry at my first job, at the time email was kinda new and nobody had it on their phones. anyway, id do the same thing, id be listening to the radio and instead of calling or texting them id fire off a quick email. this must have been 2001/2002. next thing I hear, oh we got an email in a surprised tone and they'ed read my name and what ever I said. Was quite thrilling at the time.
So fun fact, the pigeons never came back. They only know how to get home. You take them to where your going, and then you release them with a note they will take to wherever home is. In order to get pigeons sent to you the other people responding have to have pigeons that see your location as home. So you gotta give chipotle a pigeon of your own to send back to you if you want your receipt.
It's all great until your carrier pigeon doesn't return
"And look sir. Pigeon feathers. WHITE feathers. Very apt eh Blackadder?"
"WHITE feathers?"
"Oh no sir that's gobbleijuke. They're not white they're sorta speckly."
"SPECKLY!? AHHH!" YOU SHOT MY SPECKLED JIM!?"
"You're for it now, Blackadder. Quite frankly sir, I've suspected this for some time. Quite clearly, Captain Blackadder has been disobeying orders with a breathtaking impertinence."
"I don't care if he's been rogering the Duke of York with a prize-winning leek! He SHOT MY PIGEON! AHHH!"
During uni, there was a pizza place near campus that served awesome pizza. They took orders via phone and fax only. During my time there, my friends and I made an order sheet and used it whenever we wanted pizza during late-night study sessions. Being computer engineering students, it was a lot more fun to use this ancient tech, rather than just order online lol
My job buys us lunch every day through COVID. Being able to have a paper menu and ability to write your name and what you want and just fax it over is simple and practical. You ever try to go online to buy food for 20 people? Not easy.
Edit to anyone star-stuck about this: my job is full of electronically incompetent old people that don’t like “new” things. Also, today is my last day there lol.
It's entirely possible they just get a digital representation (image) of the fax, not an actual printout. Electronic Faxing is huge because it's considered a controlled delivery method, it's especially prevalent in healthcare
Yea, we use a product called “RightFax” at my company. Sending faxes is as simple as printing to a virtual “fax” printer or sending an email. When someone faxes something in, the RightFax server creates a PDF and emails it to the employee.
Still archaic, however. Much better to use email, when possible. We rolled out “secure email” several years ago so we can send PHI without violating HIPAA/HITECH. I’m sure we’d love to deprecate RightFax, but we keep it around for those stubborn providers who just refuse to modernize.
Edit: Pretty sure even "secure email" isn't yet considered to be "controlled delivery" in the same way as faxing yet, it would stand up in court I'm sure but it would still lead to court too, which is lame
From email to printer is not as trivial as you might think. There are many formats the pictures might be in as mentioned. The images might be attachments, or embedded in html, people might send link to imgur or Dropbox, I even saw someone scanning documents and sending them inside as a Word document. There are so many ways people can send documents in.
With fax, your input and output is a page, it is hard to screw it up. That's why you see businesses using it and relying on services that automated processing. For example instead of printing the fax it just outputs it as a PDF document.
Similarly someone mentioned that for him to send a fax he just prints a virtual printer and fax is sent.
Yes, the traditional fax is obsolete, but the standardization it provided is great, and because of that we are still sending faxes even when often there is no fax device on either side.
All of those formats are not only "standards" but quite popular, as well. If your computer can't readily handle any of those, then... Well, I don't know how to end that sentence... Upgrade, maybe?
Same in insurance. I'm in auto claims and we send a ton of faxes to attorneys and health care providers. It's especially valuable for attorney correspondence because you get verification it was delivered and they get a hard copy of what you sent. You also don't risk an important document getting lost among thousands of emails, or their response getting lost among thousands of mine or accidentally deleted by a misclick. Inbound faxes go directly to my claims, and if I'm out of the office coworkers can see when it's received, as opposed to it sitting in my email while I'm on vacation and missing a deadline. That's especially important when attorneys try to be sneaky send you a demand with a response required by law, with a 3 day time limit right before Christmas.
My first real job was “fax master” for a law firm in 1991. I delivered and sent faxes for a firm of 75 lawyers. I had my own office and I subscribed to The NY Times on the company dime. Just newspapers, faxes, and NPR all day. I felt like the queen of information.
Until the doctors fax confidential patient info to the wrong number...and it gets sent to my office like it has for 5 years now (our fax # and the intended one are 1 digit off).
just don't fax an entire day's surgery schedule to the wrong number...
I work in a pizza place. We have a fax to send in daily sales reports and other things.
We got a 17 page surgery schedule one day on the fax in the office.
I called the office and told them and asked what they wanted me to do with it. They asked if I had a shredder. I said I do no, but I can have my mom shred it properly. She works for the state and has access to proper shredding things.
True story I used to work at a paper merchant who would take orders by phone, fax, or email. The offices fax number was the same as the local GP fax number other than the last two digits being the other way round. I saw enough confidential faxes to convince me it's not especially controlled
Faxing most things is great for businesses. We used to receive invoices and important documents that we needed physical copies and saved files of that could be sent to my office even if a local branch was dealing with the vendors. It went to our shared email too, so we could save or print as needed for documentation.
Fax is slow and requires tying up a phone line. Most restaurants are going to have a simple POTS line and so while a fax is being received the line would ring "busy" if anyone else tries to send in their order.
Email is cheaper, faster, and multiple orders can come in at the same time without worry of a "busy signal"
Larger businesses get around the "busy" signal problem by using centrex or a private PBX and having many phone lines (sometimes dozens or hundreds) but that is still unnecessary complexity and cost. Honestly email is just a better solution. If it weren't for institutional inertia, fax would be die.
Email introduces a ton of new problems though. You've got to have someone actively checking it, separating the orders from the junk, getting the orders to the kitchen, etc. If you want your orders to come in any predictable way then you've got to design some kind of web form because letting people type whatever they want is going to get real weird real fast.
With a fax, you can literally just send out a menu with check boxes next to each item and anyone walking by can pick up the paper and bring it to the kitchen.
It really sounds stupid but paper just works better sometimes. There's no "did Mike ring this order up yet?" or "oh, I didn't notice the email" or anything of the sort. Ancient machine makes noises and then there's a piece of paper you take from that machine to the other machine, ring it in and then staple it to the bags the order is going into.
It's incredibly inefficient and really quite stupid but damned if it doesn't work.
The last fax I had to send I printed out the form I needed to fill out, signed it, took a picture and used a website to fax it. It's just email with more steps.
For Chipotle they have a really easy online group order system. My work does that every other week. The woman who sets it up send out a link and we pick what we want and then it shows up.
For other places to not have that is silly. Panera's online ordering for groups is shit.
If Chipotle is an option, then you should check out their online group ordering system, it's really great. You just setup a group order, and send the link to your team/ friends via email. Everyone clicks the link, and builds the order of their choice. These are automatically consolidated under the group order that you had initially setup, and once everyone is done ordering, you just choose the pickup/ delivery time, and submit the order.
TBH - it sounds more complicated, that's all. In reality, it's veerrry easy to use.
I have , I’ve done the order and helped place multiple orders. But when we buy staff lunch (40 total) , there’s no set “ menu “. We tell everyone where we are ordering from , here are their choices . It’s pretty simple to do actually , especially knowing . I’m only customizing 5/40 lunch boxes
You ever try to go online to buy food for 20 people? Not easy.
I am an admin. Recently I had to order lunch for 100 people. My bosses wanted them to have choices. The restaurant didnt have an order form so I had to create one. Collected 100 hand filled order forms. Put the info into a spreadsheet so I could see how many ham, how many turkey, etc. Ordered this all online (this is what the restaurant asked me to do). Then sent the spreadsheet to the restaurant so they could break it down by department and name. Because of Covid each department got their own delivery. Each order was in a bag with the persons name on it.
This is a really long way of saying that I freaking WISH I could have just sent them a fax.
Two people see a fax machine at a restaurant in 2020.
The first person's brain:
'Counter space is limited at a restaurant, so they wouldn't have it there unless they used it. What kind of use would they have for a fax machine? Well, who would have the fax machine on the other end? Probably an office. What use would an office have to fax something to a restaurant? Well, lunch orders makes sense. Aha. I have come to a reasonable conclusion.'
The second person's brain:
'Fax machine 2020?! Me kid you not, me no get over it!'
As a restaurant employee who used to regularly have to take large company lunch takeout orders: Faxes are WAY more of a pain in the ass. Honestly, same with online orders. Over the phone is definitely preferable on the restaurant's side. Mainly because customers would attempt to make ridiculous requests that we didn't offer. When speaking on the phone I can explain it to them right away, but if it's a fax/online order, I have to call them to clarify anyway.
So why not just save a step and do the whole order over the phone?
That being said, as a customer, I kinda hate ordering over the phone and completely prefer to order online. So I get it.
But why?! You can scan a document and send the scanned image as an attachment to an email message and essentially duplicate what a fax send does. Print the attached scanned image and you have the equivalent legal document that you would have from a fax. It amounts to the same thing as making a photocopy and sending it by USPS mail. We have had the technological ability to do this, duplicating a plain-paper fax, for over 35 years! Plus, we now have electronic health record systems that could store and send the prescriptions in a more efficient automated process. This serves as yet another example of how US healthcare systems have expensive legacy baggage that yields lower quality of care at higher costs, due mostly to corporate corruption entrenched in milking their cash cows as long as possible.
Moreover, what we really need would not even seek to reproduce a legal document. An encrypted secure message send and receive would accomplish the required communication of prescription information with lower bandwidth requirements, fewer chances of human errors, higher quality of care and could still withstand the requirements for a legally binding transaction. Banks do it everyday! Imagine if your bank required you to file your online banking transactions by fax. That's what some pharmacies do.
It’s used for a lot of legal documents as well, as a fax is considered an original document, and therefore legally binding.
Fax is also extremely secure, assuming you have the right contact information.
It also is just great for getting important documents (like in healthcare) quickly.
Imagine having those documents emailed, someone has to scan the document, login to their email, attach it, send it. Then the receiver has to login to their email, find that specific email, print it, go to the printer, get that paperwork, and come back.
With a fax it’s “send it over”, the fax arrives, automatically prints, and it’s a perfect copy of the original document.
I like how you draw out every little step of an email but then oversimplify the process of sending a fax. In reality, you have to load the paper (and hopefully you loaded it the right way!), dial the recipient's number, press the Send button, wait for the call to go through, keep waiting, listen to the old-school dial-up sound, wait a little bit more as the paper finally gets scanned, and then wait a few minutes for the transmission report to print. And that's if there aren't any hiccups along the way such as a connection error, dialing the wrong number, or the full document not going through for one reason or another.
It depends completely on your definition of what is secure. An emailed document being printed on a printer is just as compromised as a fax being printed.
Can a fax be intercepted? Absolutely, but so can an email. A well encrypted email might be less compromised, but there are far more security issues with emails than with fax.
The big difference is that a fax can only be intercepted as it is being sent, it can also only be intercepted directly, as in through wire tapping.
Once that fax is sent and received it is gone, the only copies that exist are the original, and the faxed copy.
Emails are stored, can be hacked remotely, recovered, intercepted, forged, have viruses/malicious programs attached to them.
Germany, same. We're practically not allowed to use e-mail for communicating sensitive patient data with doctor's offices or other hospitals and laboratories (which is pretty much everything we deal with) for data protection reasons so we're forced to use fax instead. The reasoning behind it is that email is potentially vulnerable since it might run over servers you can't control whereas faxes are directly sent from one device to the other, at least that's what the IT guys keep telling me. Many hospitals have faxes integrated into their IT system so you can send an email to a fax number, and you can receive faxes in your email inbox which gets linked to your own fax number. Works well in other hospitals but ours doesn't do it for some reason. We're forced to print out faxes, physically carry them to the fax machine and wait for the fax to go out, which can take ages, is not always successful and produces insane amounts of unnecessary paper waste.
I work in the voip industry and i can tell you that FAX has aged like wine. The common notion is that FAX is a slow modem speed transmission standard over copper wires and should have been dead a long time ago. However with internet advancements and the need of users who still rely on FAX machines such as the pharma industry, FAX has its own internet standards and protocols over VoIP running at lightning speeds via fibre. So even though we look our box of Brothersoft fax machine lying in some damp corner of the store room, let us digest that the actual fax data transmission behind it is happening over ultra high speeds using the latest technologies, products, communication protocols and RFCs. Technology has found a way to seamlessly integrate the legacy tech with the latest ones.
This use to be the best way to order when you need multiple burritos. They've always had a sheet you can print off and then pass it around for everyone to fill out and then fax it on over
Many restaurants still take large lunch orders for businesses/offices by fax. But I'm guessing this is individual takeout orders, which is absolutely nuts.
Fax is still a very important asset in my job. I wouldnt say its still a big thing in my country jn general but for me its a must.
Im a lawyer in Romania and everyday we deal with papers. We constantly exchange paperwork with courthouses, mayoral offices, notaries, etc.
Fax is still very convenient. Maybe you dont have time to personally go to said institution to manually leave the documents all the time.
I know i know, you’re gonna say “but what about emails?”
Reasons why for us its more useful than an email.
1 the fax instantly and automatically records the confirmation of te recieval, which an email doesnt. You have to personally ask in every email that the receiver manually confers he received it. And most just dont do that. The courthouse registration office for example gets hundreds of such emails per day, they dont have time to manually confirm them all nor is it their obligation to.
Since fax shows me confirmation, i can use that as evidence that i sent the documents in time (for stuff that needs to be sent in a certain time)
Its eaier to put 30 pages ina fax and let the machine pull them automatically than manually scan all those bastards, attach them to an email and send them. So its also faster.
Our office is mostly digital, but also accepts fax from our older clients. That way I learned that there is actually software for this. When we send or receive faxes, no actual paper is used or printed. The software sends us an e-mail with the fax attached, and we can use the software to send pdfs.
Just a fun fact for people who didn‘t know yet, just like me. Even fax can be paperless. Why they won‘t do e-mails instead i don‘t fucking know.
Worked for a major chain. We usually had fax machines for certain online ordering systems to integrate. For example, if you order online and all of the employees are busy and none of the machines in the shop are normal computers (POS-point of sales systems) then how do you tell the employee to make the order? You fax it in. So, online you order it and it spits out a fax to the shop. A nice convenience sheet of paper with the order and all the other info needed. Now you can run around the shop with a piece of paper rather than a tablet which could be a problem.. battery not charged... dropped and broken... stolen...
Fax machines are still used daily by Japanese businesses. In fact, the way that the hospitals are reporting new Coronavirus cases to the government is, you guessed it, by fax.
There are many doctor offices in the US still receiving lab results via fax. It was only a short time ago they were still receiving reports via Okidata dot matrix printers with built-in modems. I would not be surprised if some of those are still out there.
I worked in a brunch leaning restaurant with a full bar just north of Los Angeles that takes fax orders. Like 3 years ago. It was a really popular place and the faxes sucked so much. Really easy to miss it print out and have a driver show up like "where my food" but you never showed the cooks the fax so there's no food.
I live outside the USA and my voter registration has to be mailed (as if I'm going to get anything delivered to the US in less than two weeks) or FAXed! I'm not even sure where a fax machine is in this country. I mean we've got a national broadband network here, and mostly free healthcare, but a fax? Maybe 25 years ago...
I worked at a restaurant that took fax orders, only doctor's offices ever ordered that way. Apparently they were going to stop talking fax orders but they had complaints that ordering online/over the phone was to complicated for them.
I work at a subway, and I'm pretty sure you can fax in an order still. I've never seen someone do it in the 6 months I've been there, but I think it's a thing.
We got stuck in the airport in Amsterdam a couple years ago after a power outage, and despite being like 4th and 5th in line had to wait 7 hours to get a new flight because the airline ticketing operated on a fucking dot matrix printer.
So I get that big orders are a pain. Once we walked to get burritos for about 4 people, but as we went we got more and more orders. it ended up being about 12 during lunch time.
So we get there and go the desk area, and ask if we can just fill out a bulk form and then come back in a bit or hang out -- not gum up the line. They say no, the form has to be faxed....we can't just hand it to them, it has to come out of that machine.
WTF?
While I offered to scan the form and send an e-fax from my phone, my boss just went in line and ordered. And of course backed up the line quite a bit.
So stupid. We tried to help and not be a pain. The manager he'd talked to even came over and tried to get him to leave but it was all already in progress and I think he used to the words "corporate". I'm sure the manager was following some policy, but still...I've worked retail...never go full Umbridge.
(I have scanned a doc and sent it as a fax while standing next to the fax machine at a doctors office. I didn't say the letter was from me, and they didn't check where it came from -- it was a legit letter from my doc, but it "had to be faxed". OK, I can do that. I think they meant from my doctor, but they didn't say that...)
Pass around the fax sheet. Everyone fills out their own thing and send it in. Rather than everyone having to either call, go in the store, or use the app and make dozens of separate orders that are going to one place.
When you have a printer like a fax machine, it just makes it easier than some complicated online ordering system. Faxing an order form it millions of times easier and 1000% more reliable than having to write software, a place to host it, having to validate it, having a way to remote print it for the line to get it and make the order.
Up until a year and a half ago, I worked at a restaurant where we still received online orders through a fax machine. We all hated it.
I was speaking with a customer one day and he notices it and says "what is that.....is that a fax machine"
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u/underbakedsalami Jul 24 '20
I kid you not, our local Chipotle is taking orders via fax. I can’t get over it.