I do not know how to operate our fax machine. I have sent approximately three faxes in six years of employment here. (So: I fax biannually. The next time I send a fax, if there is a next time, I will use the joke that I am sending my biannual fax. Be ready for this!) Though I’m not saying society as a whole no longer employs faxing as a means of transferring documents. Students ask us if we have a fax service all the time. However, that is not to say I am not baffled by this need.

This topic emerges out of my love for our ceaseless flow of junk faxes. It is, to my knowledge, 2011. We get junk faxes daily. It is, evidently, still a viable business model. We easily get more junk faxes than real faxes. Somehow this makes me happy. It makes me think the world is a simpler place. Many days I spend time thinking about ways to effectively monetize my interest in doing largely nothing, and failing of course, and realizing that I will need to continue to do something for someone else who has thought of a way. Then I think of the junk faxers. Somewhere, there are people who report to work every day to send out junk faxes. I don’t know how it works–I like to think someone is standing over a fax machine, feeding an ad in, and punching up numbers from a prospect directory. They wait for it to go through for the 15 minutes or however long a fax takes, then they flip the paper over, re-feed it, and punch the next number on the list. They have no further questions about the proper orientation of the paper. They have mastered this craft. However, I suspect that despite the end product it’s exclusively done with automated faxing programs. Regardless, the rate of return is such that everyone still goes to work every day.

The junk faxes seem to mostly be for travel agencies, no less, which is even more mystifying.

However, today’s junk fax implores me to fix my credit for a mere $89. I cannot think of a more reliable way to repair my credit than via an agency advertising via junk fax. Oh wait, there are those handwritten signs advertising this service taped to streetlight posts…

My favorite bit from today’s fax is the text: “Never get turned down (for credit) again!” They just wanted to specify that all promises made therein were it regard to credit, on this document advertising credit services. You can of course expect to continue to be turned down IN LIFE. But not for credit, my good sir.