I still haven't parted with mine, but only because it's built into my all-in-one printer. However, I never use it and that second phone line is going. If I can do it, so can you!

June 14, 2007 Why Do We Still Have Fax Machines? Posted by Renee Oricchio at 10:21 AM

I honestly can't think of one.

I'm one of those all-in-one printer kind of people. I recently bought my fourth one. Like it's predecessors, it includes a printer, copier, scanner.. and FAX! I almost let it go this time and, honestly, I already regret the decision. It's just plain silly to have a fax (much less that second phone line). I can count on one hand the number of times I use it annually. It's just one more way spammers can find me (and eat into my ink and paper supply like wharf rats).

There are plenty of companies online that will send attachments out as a fax for you, plus there's always Kinko's when I'm in a pinch.

I think it's a generational thing. People of a certain age, and older, still remember the pre-PC, pre-Internet world. We're not very good at backing up our hard drives, but we're really good at clinging to our old luddite technologies. C'mon, raise your hand! How many of you hung on to your IBM Seletric well into the 90's (just to type envelopes, I swear!).

Without giving my age away, I believe the line of demarcation falls somewhere around here: whether you had a metal lunch box or softsided lunch box as a kid. Lunch boxes went to soft sides around 1985.

If you grew up, as I did, taking a metal lunch box to school then I'm guessing you, too, have reservations about giving up your fax binky. I'm not the only one angsting about this. There's a great little posting about this very topic on Web Worker Daily.

Other luddite anxieties of the metal lunchbox generation:

- You still have a landline in your home and don't just use a cell as your primary phone.

- You still have an address book with handwritten numbers and addresses.

- You still buy CDs.

- It irritates you that your bank doesn't include cancelled checks in your monthly statement.

- Although you may pay some or all of your bills online, you still like to get a paper statement.

- You still have a VHS deck attached to your television, as well as a cassette player in both your car and home. You don't use either!

I'm going to betray my own generation and say this, about that. Let it go! Let it all go!

Here's my tip of the day for business owners: if you can't afford a staff IT person, at the very least tap one of your younger employees (of the soft sided lunch box generation) to be a part of all office technology decisions. You need their fearlessness when it comes to chucking the old once and for all. Do this, and you'll go along way towards cutting down on the paper and getting rid of old redundant technologies.

Like the fax machine, for example.