1 hour ago
9
personal tech
One retro numeric keypad looks much like any other to some users
ON CALL By the end of the working week it can be tempting to phone it in, but The Register instead works to bring you extra amusement in the form of a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Orson” who told us they very much enjoyed the recent On Call about the lawyer who didn’t understand italics.
“It reminded me of an incident many years ago when I was a Facilities Manager for a major UK food company,” Orson told On Call.
“I came in one morning and was summoned by the Company Secretary, who was clearly annoyed because the night before, she tried to send an extremely urgent fax and the fax machine did not work.”
For those who don’t remember fax machines, or successfully tried to forget them, they packed a low-res scanner, a nasty printer, and a slow modem into a small appliance. The user interface included a numeric keypad used to enter the phone number of whichever remote fax machine you wanted to send a document to. Faxes were horrible, but faster than the postal service. Email killed faxes in the late 1990s (except in Japan) though manufacturers kept including fax functions in multifunction printers (MFPs) for years.
But we digress: Orson decided the way to solve this problem was to start with the wetware.
“I asked her to show me what she had done and watched as she placed the document on the in-tray, used the keypad to dial the number, and then hit Enter,” he told On Call.
Having gone through those steps, the Company Secretary stared at Orson, her pose clearly communicating a desire for him to swiftly explain why technology had let her down – and why the facilities team had left the fax machine in such a state.
“I told her she was trying to use the photocopier,” Orson told On Call.
To be fair, the presence of MFPs in many workplaces meant that wasn’t a completely horrible mistake. But as an example of a rather silly tech support moment, it makes for a fine On Call!
Does a similar tale lurk in your memory? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We’d offer to let you fax it in, but The Register doesn’t have a fax machine anymore. ®
English (US) ·