There was an evil thing sometimes done by disaffected employees just before they left offices which they hated because of a particular client: you get three or four sheets of paper, paint them black, and set them to send as a loop over the weekend, to the office which made your life hell.
Apparently (I never did this myself) both fax machines will eventually (some time during Saturday, probably) overheat and die trying to perform the evolution expected of them. There is also considerable expense at both ends.
The worst naughtiness along those lines that I know of personally was someone who on his last Friday at a job managed to go home after everyone else in his bit of the company (Price Waterhouse) and dialled the speaking clock in New York from his immediate boss’s telephone as his final act, leaving the phone in the boss’s large desk-drawer so it would not be noticed by the cleaners.
The largest user of fax machines in the world is now the NHS.
Feral was for a while involved with a tpc.int endpoint (send a suitably-formatted email and it gets delivered as a fax), but they shut it down because of lack of demand.
Here’s my fax story: I had to send a fax to the Canadian Embassy in Beijing and misdialled the number so it got through to a private phone at about four in the morning their time. The fax had a speaker as it could be used as a phone as well and we could hear a man shouting at us in - I assume - Mandarin. It sounded as if there was a tiny little Chinese man inside the machine. The office manager told me the machine was going to go on re-dialling at ten minute intervals for at least three more times and we had no idea how to stop it.
Poor man, but I’m afraid we laughed until the tears ran. It was a stressful time, moving season in the Canadian Foreign Service, so that’s me excuse.
We are having YMCA today: sausages which came out of the freezer yesterday and can’t be put back in, deadly attack potato salad, tomato raita, spinach-in-puff-party spiral, possibly a few chocolate chip cookies…
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that Someone has got it in for me. Everything I touch goes wrong. Waaah. Latest thing was scales going mad, in the middle of weighing out gredients* for a cake. Well not quite the latest thing. Something vital mysteriously vanished, after that. To list the things that went before would take too long and sound hideously self-pitying to boot. But grrrr! and gahhhh! Well, I have turned the air blue at full volume a couple of times. The neighbours can’t complain. One was out - I suspect on the pull judging from the garb;- ) - and the others had a full-on family barney, including people storming out and everything. In another mood, I would have found that highly entertaining.
Perhaps, as per Pratchett, I should go and talk to a witch - to ask her to stop doing it.
*with flawless three-year-old logic, I insisted that they were gredients until they were ‘in’ something. Still strikes me as a reasonable stance.
Well, I am conceited enough to think that Magrat, being quite the wet hen, wouldn’t be able to be doing this at me. I reckon Granny. Although I have a sneaking fondness for Tiffany, largely founded on her use of her wee brother as monster bait.