ryan kennedy’s blog

I’m in the middle of selling my house, part of my aforementioned relocation to the Bay Area. As part of that, I need to sign a bunch of paperwork to get the process rolling. The only problem is that the paperwork is in Folsom and I’m in Sunnyvale. What’s the solution? The fax. I have to get the documents faxed to me so I can sign them and then fax them back.

Seriously, if there’s one piece of technology that should have been obsoleted by the Internet years ago, it’s the fax machine. It’s a pain to find one and once you do, you get charged per page to use it. Email, on the other hand, is free and vastly more useful and ubiquitous.

Of course, even if you could email the documents back and forth, there’s still the small matter of your signature. You need to find a printer to print out the documents and then a scanner to scan the signed documents. Oddly enough, nobody actually cares about the signature. Sure, they’ll say they care about it. That they have to have it. That the document isn’t legal without it. But will they actually verify it? No, I could dip my cat’s paw in ink, have them scribble something on the page and call it my signature. Nobody would complain. The document would be perfectly legal.

It would have been just as much a verification of my consent to ask me over the phone as it would be to make me fax something with a handwritten signature.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 8:58 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.