2. Getting permission to quit fax would require an act of God.
And because god doesn't exist, it'll never happen, right?
I work for a seriously entrenched goverment agency.
I feel your pain. I've worked for various agencies within Government for many years. I could tell you some stories and I think only those who have worked in Government would actually believe most of them.
I actually worked in an area about 8 years ago that still used an electric typewriter to send and receive incoming and outgoing messages from other branches. I kid you not! This was fairly common even well into the 2000's. When I joined that organisation, I questioned my supervisor at the time to try and discover some logic into why we were using a well and truly outdated bit of gear (which kept breaking... I suspect on purpose a lot of the time). I honestly didn't get it because everyone had their own government email address which was good for even protected material as the message never traversed the internet, even between external agencies.
Their only justification was that "it was accountable and traceable". What happened was that each time a message was sent, the next "unique" serial number in the sequence was used, which both ends had. If one person wanted to inquire about the message, they only need quote the message number. Except:
- There was no "backup" copy of the message or the associated index. If the page was removed and lost, there goes the message and all record of it from that branch office.
- Sometimes people couldn't count so occasionally two messages shared the same number. That made things really confusing.
Even after explaining that email kept a permanent record that couldn't be deleted by the end-user and that you could request delivery/read receipts, I was told that the typewriter was staying. I resisted, even developing a Microsoft Word template for the exact same form, but I was told not to use it as it wasn't "official".
Eventually the typewriter broke under... ehem... mysterious circumstances and it would be too expensive to repair or replace and that was the end of that.
Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up!