Hacker News Reader

>the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all.

You underestimate government inefficiency. You are correct, but I can also see a system that naively prints whatever is verified as a valid entry automatically.

possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.

I'm not so naive as to think there's no podunk, crossroads "town" out there that has some mayberry-ass fax machine just spitting out whatever you send it. But given how attractive government offices are to people for either pranking or ...ahem redressing via their fax machines since the late 70's, it's more common than you might believe for even the smallest little townships to have a contract with a company that turns faxes into emails.

Mentioned it in another comment, but I used to intern at a large physics facility in the UK some 15 years ago, and we had one of such old fax machines on a desk next to mine.

I only ever saw it print some automobile-related ads, about one-two per day, so I'm pretty sure if someone did the thing described in the story to our number, it would absolutely keep printing until the upstream aborted. I also know the whole floor section would be disturbed, and we wouldn't know what to do other than to unplug the machine and file a ticket with IT.

Now, fortunately, that fax machine was not a part of anyone's daily work there. In the situation/story described in the article, however, the fax machine is a critical dependency and disabling it like this pretty much shuts down part of the office. It really only ruins the day of individual employees, and possibly ruins the lives of fellow disabled. To the extent the government will care, they will chase the author/protagonist for misdemeanor, as they should.

Irrelevant. Even if you're right, and not merely oblivious to the space of possible deployments of fax handling support in modern offices, the author (or narrator) is clearly proud of their behavior in situation (or story) they posted, so my comment stands.

The text leans heavily ChatGPT.

I suspect this is a revenge fantasy rather than something that actually happened.

As for who's responsible - it's a mix. Some people who deal with these situations are doing their jobs because they have no choice.

Some are active sadists and do the job because they get to bully the weak.

This happens a lot in benefits management, and also in immigration, in most countries.

The feature is called "unified inbox" - faxes appear as a PDF attachment in an email inbox somewhere.

If the government department had a unified inbox for emails/faxes accessible by workers, then there wouldn't have been any "pain" in the form of consumables by the fax machine. That was my worry.

Luckily for the author, the article says the fax number was handled by an old-school, real-life fax machine:

  It was Karen. She sounded breathless. She sounded like she was standing next to a machine that was hyperventilating. In the background, I could hear a rhythmic whir-chunk, whir-chunk.

  "Yes?" I answered, my voice the picture of innocent helpfulness.

  "Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."

Yup.

Myself, I only saw one fax machine in actual operation in my life, some 15 years ago in a large government physics lab in United Kingdom. That machine sat on a desk near me, and would absolutely print anything and everything that would be sent to it.

Since we were a small internal software team in a big physics lab (vs. front-line customer service), it wasn't used much - I only ever saw it print automobile ads, at the rate about one per day.

> Luckily for the author, the article says[...]

>the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop.[emphasis added]

if you believe that a government employee called this person back - especially in a full panic, right next to the alleged machine - I've got a bridge to sell you. I mean, yikes.

"Sir, please." - yeah; total defeat. this low-level government employee was in such a desperate place that they had to call the only person who could fix it and helplessly beg him to stop. the machine was simultaneously out of toner, but still trying to chug on with the print, making mechanical noises of helplessness? tl;dr - everybody clapped.