Michael Buffington

Fax Unplugged

Tuesday, November 05 2002

In my dream I was sitting around a glossy beech conference table. The gloss provided by a layer of thick epoxy, forever preserving the freshness of the wood locked inside. Sitting to my left was Hulk Hogan in a well tailored suit. His usual layer of cocoa butter was missing, leaving him looking a little less lethal, and a little more approachable.

On the rounded corners to his left sat Dick Clark, youthful as always, and another Dick Clark, a mirror image of the first except for a blindingly brilliant golden bicuspid, casting a soft gold reflection on Jessie Ventura, who was sitting directly across from me. Jessie had a spiderman suit on, the hood/mask pulled down. If he wasn’t bald, you’d notice partially sweaty hair. His eyebrows took over this task instead, showing that he’d just been involved in some type of crime fighting action.

Wonder Woman (the cartoon, not Linda Carter), to his left, asked, or more appropriately, declared “Food.com is a vastly more valuable domain that Foodnetwork.com, isn’t it?”. All eyes were on me, at which point I launched into a lengthly explanation about how the name wasn’t as important as the content, how the Food Network was branded as the Food Network, there might have a better time with a matching domain and -

The phone is ringing. It’s 5:21am. We let it go to the answering machine. It’s a fax. There’s no one on this earth who needs to fax me something at 5:21am. I narrow the scope to this earth, because I have no idea if faxes from space follow the same ettiquite. My fax machine is out of paper, and as if the call wasn’t annoying enough, my fax machine is more annoying by accepting the fax into memory, then beeping every ten seconds to inform me that it would like some paper to print the fax on.

I walk into the office, and yank all cords out of the back of the machine. The fax machine is unplugged.

I vow to sue a fax spammer within 6 months time. It’s now my sworn duty.