Faxing is no longer an appropriate form of communication.
But some folks missed the memo*
We’ve recently bought a house and are putting our current house on the market. Anyone who has gone though the home switching process knows it involves many documents each with many signatures. An innovative company, DocuSign, has streamlined this process for the modern world. There are passwords, confirmations, and each time you go in, an active checkbox threshold window requires signers to acknowledge that they know their e-signatures function like ink signatures. Then you go to the little icons mimicking post-it “Sign Here” tabs, click, and add your signature. The first time you use it, you pick a signature font for your signature and intials.
This doesn’t really make a tedious process easier —you still have to sign and send all of the docs — but it does make the process fit modern life that no longer operates in felled tree pulp. Businesses can keep fewer paper files. Even banking and taxes can be conducted via the web. Hard documents are becoming rarer.
But occasionally there is a holdout.
My kids’ pediatrician office still operates by fax. Yes, fax — the telephone like devices that make that screechy, static-y computer handshake that was once so ubiquitous it made it into a Seinfeld storyline.
For younger readers, the telephone printers send paper documents, which many people no longer keep, over land lines, which many people no longer have. My husband, a lawyer at a large law firm, still has a fax at work but he says in the six years we’ve been back in the states, the only faxes he has received are from our kids’ doctor’s office, and that is because I have to email files to him so his fax can do the required faxing.
I’ve tried apps that send faxes wirelessly. They are expensive, unreliable, and spammy. I have a printer that can fax, but the house doesn’t have phone lines anywhere it makes sense to put a printer, and I’ve never called in the carpenter and phone people to put a phone line in where we keep the printer. (I will be doing that before we paint the new house.) Plus, I’m GenX and so one of the dwindling number of people who bothers with a landline. I say that I put it in for emergencies, but usually it’s for faxes from our pediatrician.
What’s the upshot of all of this — or more to the point — what prompted this rant today? Camp and activity forms. The whole thing started a few months ago, when I forgot to take the booklet worth of forms to the doctor to fill out at the kids’ well kid checkups. Well, I forgot the ones I knew about. Other forms became necessary after our visits. Anyway, because I didn’t take the forms, I entered into the fax zone. Yes, I could drop the papers off as they come up, but we got this pediatrician — who we all love, by the way, so there will be no changing of docs unless he retires — when we lived in another part of town. Dropping off and picking up these documents is about an hour round trip thanks to Houston construction. So one might think that faxing would be easier. Oh, one would be wrong.
The rigamarole my husband and I have gone though to get physical forms for four kids’ activities is nuts. Assuming summer camp and one activity, that’s eight sets of forms. (What? Think there is a generic physical form? Oh, no, no no. Each activity requires their own forms. Legal departments at each insurance company — because make no mistake, that is what is driving the spawning of physical fitness forms — have developed their own forms.)
My kids are older and have started more than one activity each. So I have a booklet of forms to fill out each year, and usually one set gets snakebit. (That’s a little Texas terminology for small things in one’s life that attract Murphy’s Law. The person’s whose texts always end up lost in a busy day. The fave shop that is always closed when you have a chance to stop in. Or the set of activity forms you forgot, then filled out incompletely.) I’d really love one generic form, although, I get that, say, scuba diving requires a physical fitness form with additional info because scuba diving has pressure risks and medical contra-indications that swim team doesn’t. But why Boy Scout camps can’t accept the same form as a traditional summer camp, or the middle school soccer team can’t accept either, escapes me.
So, I, a mother of four, am almost continuously emailing forms to my husband’s office to have them faxed to the doctor’s office. Once filled out (and the office is great about that turnaround) they get faxed back to my husband for scanning and then emailing to the activity administrator. Or occasionally, they get printed for an ink signature because only some of the activities’ allow for uploading. In the end, it’s a bunch of potential eyes on medical info, which undercuts the doctors’ offices’ rationale. Doc offices say they stick with faxing for privacy concerns.
Printing is a whole other technology trap. We got our printers after we moved back to the states six years ago. First, we have two because five years ago you couldn’t get a wireless printer that talked to Mac (me) and PCs (my husband), or if you could they were really expensive. Considering that I’m not printing much beyond activity forms, the expense wasn’t justified. But now our still functional printers stopped communicating with our network. The network software got updated, but the hardware did not. In fact, computer accessory hardware often has to be replaced, not because it doesn’t work anymore, but because the company stops issuing software updates. People fretting about straws ending up in landfills might more consequentially protest about intentionally obsolete tech hardware ending up in landfills.
But back to the activity form rigamarole. Sometimes I fudge by exporting the fax to a PDF, signing with my stored signature, and then sending the PDF to the camp or activity coordinators. As part of this year’s learning from experience, I will be having my kids create their signatures on my computer since these forms occasionally require both parent and kid signatures, probably as part of the cautionary function of contracts — which gets to something more serious about all of this form and faxing stuff.
In law, signing a document has various functions: cautionary, evidentiary, and channeling. The contract is evidence of the agreement. A written contract means you can appeal to courts for enforcement, that there is a channel for making each side adhere to the agreement. And the cautionary function is basically the assumption that if you bothered to write it out (remember these common laws were developed back when writing it out really meant writing it out), sign it, and seal it, then you really meant it. But I wonder how much the cautionary function means when we are constantly handed forms to sign.
When every activity perceived to have any risk has a waiver of liablity form, when every website and app comes with a shrink wrap agreement** requiring us to click AGREE to use the app, then what cautionary function is left, regardless of how we affix our signatures? Anyway…
At least homeroom moms got on board with money transferring apps like Venmo. About two years ago I was close to writing a rant like this one about sending teacher-gift handwritten checks in children’s backpacks. It wasn’t that it was difficult, but that writing checks is out of the norm. I haven’t even had the getting stuck behind the little old lady writing a check in the grocery line problem for years. When I used to write checks monthly to pay bills, well, I was used to writing checks. These days with auto-pays and e-check services, I have my checkbook tucked in a drawer, rarely used. And I certainly wasn’t remembering it in the morning routine — or in the afternoon routine when there are other things to sign like kids’ homework schedules and daily reports.
But about the time I was fed up with rounds of check writing for homeroom things, moms in my cohort got on to Venmo and PayPal. The days of forgetting to write a check, having the children forget to take it out of their packs, and perhaps cancelling it when it got lost and then starting over — those days were gone in a snap.
I have a theory that these tech innovation growing pains hit GenXers pretty hard. We can do the old ways. We can do the new ways. But we are stuck in the transition phase when we often have to do them both ways, either because we hung on to the old too long or we are having to translate between the old and new ways of doing things. It’s just a lot of detail to keep up with.
End rant. (For now, anyway. I have one on this generational tech and ettiqute gap about party invitations, RSVPs, and thank you notes in the works.)
*Missing the memo — seemed an appropriately ironic dead metaphor for this little story.
**They are called shrink wrap agreements because before digital downloads, the agreements were part of the package shrink wrap and you agreed to the terms by opening the wrap.
