Fixing My Fax

No writer or editor seems to have a perfect record without mistakes in this business. I know I’ve made my share of them. It’s odd to me how you can spend a large part of some days simply straightening out one of those mistakes—like yesterday.

Some of you may not know this information about my writing life. Last August our family moved from Colorado Springs, Colorado to Scottsdale, Arizona. As a part of that move, I tried to carefully eliminate anything that didn’t need to be moved. One gadget that I thought I could eliminate was my fax machine. It’s a rare day that I receive a fax these days—or send one.  When I purchased a Dell laptop last year, it came with one of these all-in-one machines (fax, scanner, color printer, etc.) I decided to sell my old plain paper fax machine to the used computer store. I was fine with it until recently.

I tried to get the fancy all-in-one machine to work as a fax—and couldn’t seem to get it working. In the last week, I’ve had several situations where I needed to receive a fax or send one.  After doing a bit of online research, I went to Officemax and picked up a new fax machine.  It was fairly simple to install yet one of the things that took some unexpected additional time was locating a dual phone jacks. I was certain I had one at home so I didn’t purchase another one. I probably should have purchased one and it would have saved the “digging through boxes” time but I persisted and came up with it.

This afternoon I was pleased when I was able to easily send a fax.  I hadn’t received one. Then I remembered my youngest son in Colorado Springs wanted to fax his grades from the last semester to me. For the first time, he made all A’s  (You can tell I’m a proud father).  I sent him an IM and asked him to fax me his grades. I set the new fax machine right beside the all-in-one machine that I couldn’t seem to get to fax several months ago.

My son’s fax arrived right on schedule—but came out on the all-in-one machine—not my new fax machine. Both machines are hooked to the same telephone line. At least I can fax out and receive faxes. Of course, I could spend another large chunk of time trying to get them to work like I expected them to work (nothing on the all-in-one machine and send and receive from the new fax machine). Since now I have a working fax machine, I believe I’m better off leaving it alone.

Oh, the things we get involved in as writers and editors. Some times the truth is stranger than fiction.