New Pet Peeve

I guess this never came up before because it was beyond my imagination that someone would do this, but I'm seeing it often enough at work for me to call it out: people who write an email, but instead of sending it, print it out and fax it.

They must believe that this is a more secure fashion of sending emails. I will concede that ten years ago, there were problems with emails being intercepted, and as recently as two weeks ago, Sarah Palin's emails were broadcast over the web, but that was because she used Yahoo Mail and had a really easy password to guess. Technology has done some good things recently, and although email is still not secure, it's just as safe as mail, or fax, or telephone. But that's not what bothers me.

What really bothers me is how mind-blowingly wasteful this is. The only waste of resources I can accept from people is when the way they're doing it is easier than the more efficient option. I never like going out of my way to be more sustainable. Ever. I do it because I have to. But to type something into a program specifically designed to communicate without paper, then to print it, especially when most email programs have a built-in fax option, is ludicrous. It's actually a huge inconvenience to type something, print it, then submit it electronically. Especially since most peoples' fax machines are their scanners. There's something inherently and fundementally wrong about that.

Also, it's not for nothing that emails are searchable, modifiable, resizeable, and can be manipulated, read and archived by computers. When you print it out and fax it, all of that functionality is lost. And when we get these "printed emails," they are always requests for something to be entered into our computers. Hey jackwad—you already did the computer part for us, why not just pass it along? Selfish fucking prick.