HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — George Richards and the fax machine on his desk have been through a lot together.
“It’s kept me company here for years,” said Richards, the abc27 operations manager who has been at the station for … well … long enough to remember the first fax machine in the station, “a smaller machine with specially treated paper … thermal paper and a cutting bar.”
Nice, huh? Well, e-mail still had a decade to spare, and it surpassed mail.
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“It was state of the art for like a year,” Richards said. “And then he just got into trouble.”
He described waiting for critical documents to be printed slowly, page by page.
“So you pick it up, you look at it, and then you wait for the next page,” Richards said. “You pick it up and look at it. So I guess that created some of the suspense.”
In other words, if the Brother-made machine on his desk (“parked illegally for now,” Richards said, because station engineers already unplugged it) is a dinosaur, at least it’s a Cretaceous dinosaur relatively recent
These were the last dinosaurs before, well, you know what happened next. And that’s what happens with fax machines.
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The practice of faxing? “It’s being phased out, and more quickly lately,” Richards said.
But the faxes still arrive. Three this week were a Pennsylvania court that provided key information about a man accused of selling body parts on Facebook; the Shippensburg neighborhood announcing the end of the boil water alert; and a Miami Beach rabbi sending his weekly “Shabbat Shalom Fax,” including information about the weekly Torah portion.
So while the physical fax machine is gone, the fax line is still there: now, the faxes are converted into PDF documents, which appear in Richards’ email inbox on one of these new computers which you may have heard of.
For the younger abc27 staffers, the entire fax era came and went without ever touching a fax machine. But surely Kaylee Fuller, a recent college graduate and member of the digital team specializing in search engine optimization, which… well, veterans like George Richards surely can’t do, if they even know what it is, could use a simple fax. machine?
“No. Honestly, no,” Fuller said. “I’ve never used one.”
He agreed to give it a try and guessed correctly where to put the exit document.
But wait, Kaylee – you forgot a cover.
“What is a cover?” she asked.
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To his credit, he guessed correctly, without consulting a search engine, before getting the answer.
“Oh, he has… is that what, like whose name you’re sending it?” she asked.
