A former facilities manager recalls an executive becoming frustrated after an urgent fax apparently failed to send, only for the problem to prove to be user error. The incident matters chiefly as a light-hearted example of how similar-looking office technology can cause confusion, particularly before email displaced faxing.

The company secretary had placed her document in a machine, entered a fax number on its keypad and pressed Enter, expecting it to transmit. When asked to demonstrate, she was found to be using a photocopier rather than the fax machine; the article notes that multifunction printers may have made the mistake more understandable. It also explains that fax machines combined scanning, printing and slow modem technology, and were largely superseded by email in the late 1990s.