Faxing - A Short Story

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant land of Modern Healthcare, little Timmy needed something very important. Timmy wasn’t asking for a toy, or a puppy, or even extra screen time. Timmy needed his medical form sent to Dr. Patterson right away so he could get the treatment that would help him feel better. His mom printed the form, carefully filled it out, and marched confidently toward the dusty gray box sitting in the corner of the office: the fax machine.

“Don’t worry, Timmy,” she said. “We’ll fax it.”

The fax machine hummed to life like an elderly robot waking up from a nap it started in 1997. It whirred. It beeped. It made a noise that sounded like two dial-up modems arguing in a tunnel. Timmy watched as the paper slowly slid in. The machine thought about its life choices. It beeped again. Then it stopped.

“Transmission error.”

Timmy blinked. His mom blinked. The fax machine blinked with a tiny, judgmental red light.

You see, fax machines don’t send documents the way email does. They don’t wrap your important form in neat little digital envelopes and check to make sure every piece arrives safely. No. A fax machine turns your document into squealy robot noises and shouts them across a phone line like it’s 1985 and everyone owns shoulder pads. If there’s a hiccup, a sneeze, a whisper of packet loss, or the faintest cosmic shrug in the network, the fax simply gives up and declares defeat.

Timmy’s mom tried again.

The machine dialed. It screeched. It negotiated ancient rituals known only to telecom archaeologists. Somewhere far away, another fax machine picked up. The two machines began chanting at each other in sacred tones. For a moment, it seemed hopeful. The paper moved. The lights flickered.

Then: “Line busy.”

Busy? Busy doing what? It’s a machine whose entire job is to sit there and wait for paper. But apparently, somewhere in the labyrinth of copper wires, digital trunks, and voice gateways pretending to be 1990s telephone lines, something wasn’t perfectly aligned. And fax, being the dramatic relic that it is, cannot handle imperfection. It demands a flawless, uninterrupted, perfectly timed conversation — like a Victorian aristocrat fainting at the first hint of inconvenience.

Timmy started to worry. His tummy hurt. The form was important. His mom fed the paper back into the machine like a sacrificial offering. Third try.

This time, it began to send. The display proudly announced “Page 1.” The squealing resumed. The machine strained heroically. Page 1… complete. Page 2… halfway. And then, as if startled by its own success, it stopped mid-sentence.

“Communication error.”

Half a form now existed in some limbo dimension inside Dr. Patterson’s office. Maybe it printed half a diagnosis. Maybe it printed Timmy’s name and then dissolved into static. No one knew. Fax machines do not explain themselves. They do not apologize. They simply fail with confidence.

The truth is, fax was born in a world of steady analog lines — smooth, predictable copper paths where sound traveled like a polite train on time. Today’s networks are digital, compressed, packetized, optimized, rerouted, jitter-buffered marvels. They are brilliant for video calls, cloud backups, and streaming cat videos in 4K. But fax? Fax insists on pretending it’s still whispering over a pristine 1980s phone circuit. When modern networks do what modern networks do — adjust timing, compress silence, reroute around congestion — fax throws up its hands and says, “This is not the world I signed up for.”

Timmy’s mom tried again. Fourth attempt. Fifth attempt. Each time the machine negotiated its fragile little handshake, hoping the universe would remain perfectly still for ninety uninterrupted seconds. Each time, something twitched. A delay here. A tiny bit of distortion there. A line that technically worked fine for voice calls and internet browsing decided not to be absolutely flawless for robotic screaming noises. And fax, being fax, interpreted this as a personal betrayal.

Meanwhile, Timmy’s mom could have scanned the form and uploaded it securely in seconds. She could have sent it through encrypted email with automatic error correction. She could have used a portal that confirms receipt and logs delivery. Modern systems resend lost data automatically. They verify every piece. They recover gracefully from interruption. They assume the world is messy and build resilience into the design.

Fax does not believe in resilience.

Fax believes in vibes.

On the sixth try — because persistence is apparently part of the ritual — the fax machine finally completed its dramatic performance. It printed a tiny confirmation slip as if it had just scaled Everest. No guarantee the pages were readable. No assurance the lines weren’t smudged by compression artifacts. Just a triumphant little receipt that said, essentially, “Probably.”

Timmy got his care. But not because fax is reliable. Not because fax is modern. Not because fax is robust. He got it because his mom was patient, stubborn, and willing to retry an outdated system until it grudgingly cooperated.

And as Timmy lay in bed that night, feeling better, he asked, “Mom, why do we still use fax?”

His mom looked at the gray box in the corner — silent now, pretending innocence — and sighed.

“Because sometimes,” she said, “important systems are built on very old things. And those old things don’t like change.”

The moral of the story is simple: when you build something critical — like healthcare — on top of fragile, legacy technology that expects a perfect world, you get a system that works… eventually… maybe… if you’re lucky. Faxing isn’t evil. It’s just old, stubborn, and hilariously unsuited for the modern networks it insists on using.

And if little Timmy ever grows up to design systems of his own, he will remember the day the fax machine screamed into the void and failed six times — and he will build something that checks, retries, verifies, adapts, and actually belongs in this century.

The end.