Fax you, Mo.

Just the other day I was mouthing off again. This time it was in the midst of closing on a house, and being asked to fax something I could've emailed.

"Fax!? Hell no, I don't have a fax! Why don't I just e-mail
it to you?"

Pause. Maybe conversing beyond phoneshot, or maybe just a pause, and then,
"That would be okay...We could accept that."
The fax was unnecessary, but if I hadn't come on like an angry bear, they would've had me driving to some place and paying through the nose, or poaching on employer machines. It only makes sense if you like crappy image quality.
Or if you happen to be a gatekeeper guarding turf much diminished in the computer age, especially in our sick economy.

Of course the people I'm dealing with are nice, so I just hit send and leave it at that. But fax machines just piss me off, so I stewed until later on when I was talking to my wife, and I made some crack about only old people having faxes. And fascists utterly feckless without faxes, tools of evil. She listened a while, let me vent, and I forgot about faxes.

Until circumstances forced me to recall. The next day it turned out that closing could not happen without an immediate fax. Yep. A signed page just not close enough to a scanner had to get there now. Because sometimes a transaction is so complex it demands the kind of unverifiable electronic simulacric signature that only faxes provide.

Sounds like karma, eh? Act rude, and you get payback.

And sometimes it just keeps on paying. Because remember, I was not only irritating real estate people, I was knocking on oldsters. So who do you think had the fax? Yep. Grandpa (Congratulations on the big 7-0!) has one right in his study.
So I ate crow, which is not so bad fried up nice and crispy in great-Grandma's skillet. Heheee!

But remember how I was ungratefully complaining about fascists, after all they've given us? The next day I bought a lawnmower (an old-school motorless one, because I may hate faxes, but really do love a lot of old technology. I mean, I'm an archaeologist, for fax sake.) Like the autobahn and prompt Italian trains, lawnmowers are fruits of corporate fascism. My getting one that runs without petrol was me flipping a tiny bird at the machine while it made money off me.

So I think it had a lot more to do with revenge than cosmic balance, but payback is payback. ) I started assembling the mower, but confound it if there weren't but half the fasteners needed and no handle at all. The instructions offered a toll-free number for the missing parts to be delivered. And after almost no phone tree (strange) I spoke to a real person (more strange) with a flawless mid-west accent (suspicious), who asked what was wrong, the item number, and said he would ship the parts (obviously some kind of hoax), "As soon as you fax the receipt to 1-904..."

Oh. As in "Boy, if you keep complaining about faxes being corporate BS, and fascists with faxes, you gonna find we don't take too kindly to that. Now you got a chance to toe the line, fax your receipt, and the machine will run just fine, understand? And if you don't, just remember we have vacancies in Gitmo, Mo. He-heh. Fax you, boy."

Yep. Karma and then vengeful corporate fascists both faxed me. Serves me right for getting all worked up and mean about something as trivial, and apparently useful, as a fax