It's Been a Long (and Snowy) Week

Believe it or not, I really did get a second entry up last week, but I ended up taking it down because it was written when I was feeling a little bit cranky. A vendor of mine did something completely unprofessional and I was so bothered by it that it was the only thing I could focus on enough to write about. I read the entry over the next morning and while I didn't name names, I still didn't like the negative vibes so I deleted it.

To make up for the weeklong absence, I will try to get a few entries up this week. The big news around here for the past few days has been snow. And lots of it. I don't have the exact snow totals, but we've probably seen 14–16 inches in the past five days. And they're saying that we could get 4-8 inches more in the next two days. By far the snowiest week we've had since I moved back to Bay City.

The photo above was taken about five hours into the big storm last Friday morning. I was able to run out of the studio and use the camera for about sixty seconds before I rushed back into the studio to keep the camera from getting too wet. The whole city was halfway shut down on Friday. I sat here in the studio and tried to work, but spent a lot of my time just watching it snow. It was a very relaxing day.

One thing I had to do at the end of last week was fax something to a vendor. That's right...I said 'fax.' How very 1980s. Years ago I had a dedicated fax line and a fax machine and so forth, but that technology has very quickly become little more than an annoyance. There are a few good reasons for still using a fax machine versus using e-mail, but only a few (even hand-written documents are more easily scanned and e-mailed).

In his book Microserfs, Douglas Coupland says that receiving a fax is like getting an e-mail from the 1980s—and that was written in 1996. It's been twelve years since the book was written.

If you are a company who still uses fax as a primary mode of communication, you really need to think about what message this conveys to your clientele. Compared to e-mail fax is low tech, time intensive, less efficient, more costly to operate and less flexible. Do you want your clients to think you are low tech, time intensive, less efficient, more costly and less flexible? Fax machines take up space, use electricity and are totally redundant.

Trust me...it's time to ditch the fax machine.