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So Long Voicemail, Give My Regards To the Fax Machine
itwbennett writes: Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called "as pointless as a pigeon with a pager," finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.
Obviously, submitter doesn't work in healthcare or legal fields. As much as I'd like to see that antiquated technology finally die, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
How do you know whether a phone number that you are calling is actually a cellphone which can accept IMs? When I call someone, I usually ask them if it's a good time to talk before getting into the conversation. If they are in a meeting, I'd prefer it if they ignored the call and sent me to their voice mail, where I could have more time to tell them exactly what you would say in the IM. Your solution would only make sense the day land lines are extinct, or that every phone has IM capability - cellular or cordless.
There are tens of thousands of fax machines and fax systems still in use today because, despite all of our technological advances, the fax machine is still the most secure way of delivering medical and legal documents between locations in a compact time frame.
E-mail? Right out unless you're configured for encryption and getting all the companies you deal with to agree on, utilize, and understand how the encrypt/decrypt works is ... beyond Herculean in scope. In the medical field alone that would require suppliers, doctor's offices, HME/DME companies, hospitals, hospices, quick care/walk-in style facilities, pharmacies, and so on to all have a system that worked easily that everyone agreed on. Of course, that doesn't begin to take into account the MILLIONS of patients that just might want to communicate with you via e-mail.
The legal field is just as bad - judges, courts, lawyers, public defenders, police departments, fire departments, etc, and clients of course.
So, yeah, technology that has supposedly died usually is alive and well and the people who think it has died just work somewhere they don't have to deal with it.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
The reason they don't tell you to scan and email it is that email is not considered a secure or verifiable method of communication.
The difference between fax's point-to-point nature and email's going over the public internet aside...
It's a lot easier to mistype an email address than misdial a fax machine (and actually get another fax machine). I get confidential real estate info in my email all the time. Usually headed with 'I know this said fax, but I'm emailing it instead!'
Yeah, and it's not for me. There's a real estate agent who has the same username at a different domain. So I wind up with all these legal forms from morons who not only decided to email what it says 'fax' on it - they emailed it to the wrong address.
I've never gotten a mis-sent fax to my personal fax machine. At the office once in a while, but even then it's for someone else in the company.
You can totally fuck off the VoIP phones by misconfiguring the switches and routers in your network, no problem, and then their voices sounds as shitty as the software client. And you can install the software client correctly, and threat the VoIP packets accordingly also in the Desktop LAN, and suddenly the voice quality will be as good as with the hardware phones.