Wendy Wallbridge
I need to tell you about my nemesis for the past 10 years. I will call him Roger because it’s a good idea to give your enemies a name. Roger is a fax machine.
When we first moved back to Victoria in 2003, we got a new phone number. Whoever had the number before us apparently had a lot of debt and also loved getting faxes on vacation deals. Picture this…being pregnant with a child under 2 and having your phone ring at different times in the day and in the wee hours of the morning at least 3 times a week, picking it up and having that distinct fax squeal sound blast into your eardrum.
The trouble was we had no idea who was faxing us all the time, so we finally got ourselves a fax machine (aka Roger) so when the phone rang and started beeping, we could run and plug it in and see who it was. You couldn’t leave Roger plugged in because then our phone wouldn’t work, so when these numbers called in the middle of the night, Sean or I would have to run into the living room and plug in the fax as fast as we could to try to receive a message and finally get a phone number of who was calling all the time.
This went on for months actually (the previous guy really liked his vacations). Once we had received all these faxes and sent messages back to ask them to stop sending these to us, Roger was a pretty good tool for a while. At least I thought so until every time I’d use it to send a fax to someone, it would grab all of my papers at once and feed them through at the same time or would get jammed constantly. I spent a lot of time swearing at that machine!
Fast forward to a few weeks ago when we were cleaning out the home office. Sean reminded me that I can actually scan my papers if I need to send them to someone (sometimes I forget these things). So after having fantasies of reenacting the scene from Office Space where they attack a printer with a baseball bat, we passed Roger on to Sean’s dad (sorry Terry).
I guess I didn’t realize until I saw that thing sitting in the garage how much it has annoyed me! Now…what to name the scanner….