Now take a deep breath...and step away from the fax machine

[jethrien]

So first thing yesterday morning, one of our guys called me and told me that a fax was coming in from a museum in Asia. Since he wasn't in the office that day, he wanted me to fax it to him at home, and to give a copy to another coworker. I did so, and forgot all about it after that.

Today I came in and checked the fax machine to make sure nothing important had come in for our department. There were five identical faxes, all requesting our guy to tell them whether he'd received the original fax as soon as possible. They started at 5:33. The next one was at 5:35, then 5:37, then 5:42, then 5:44.

So - if you were desperately panicking that someone hadn't received your fax (which, by the way, was time-sensitive only in that it should be dealt with in the next couple weeks, not in the next fifteen minutes), what would you do? I feel like I'd perhaps send one fax. If I was really concerned, I might send another half an hour later. If I received no response, then I would probably assume one of two things - either there was no one in the office (c'mon, look up the time difference and figure out that it's the end of the workday!) or that I had the wrong fax number (which is what things like phones and email are for!).

But apparently our strange little friend decided that the best way to deal with this issue was to send five identical faxes spaced about two minutes apart.

Someone shouldn't be allowed to play with the fax machine anymore.

Comments

Umm, great big cultural clash here

[freekofnature.livejournal.com]

That is how fax machines are used in Asia. Particularly in Japan, by Japanese.
See,there are three different alphabets in use in most countries, and depending on the content of, and the recipient (personal, type of institution, type of content) determining which alphabet to use, the primary and preferred method of communication is Fax. That is why they adopted it so long ago and perfected it so much. E-mail is impossible in this context and telephone conversation is considered "gauche" particularly in an cultural arts environment in which this is obviously being used. The fact that the fax was obviously in English does not really matter. The sender was just being polite and respectful.

Re: Umm, great big cultural clash here

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Or, they just learned their phone/fax etiquette from my mom, who will call 6 times in 20 minutes. The vast majority of the time, there's no emergency. This tends to happen while I'm in class.

Re: Umm, great big cultural clash here

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I think this is actually much more likely. A) The country in question is not Japan. B) The particular guy faxing us has a reputation in the department as being weird. Not foreign-weird - these people deal with international colleagues all the time. Just weird-weird. His colleagues probably think he's weird, too.