Might your fax machine be sending things upside down? Think about those receiving your faxes digitally
You may never think about this if you only receive faxes on paper, but if you send faxes to someone who receives them digitally, you could make their life easier if you take care to send them right-side-up. If you've never tested how your machine sends them, you may want to. Let me explain.
I hooked up a new fax machine and after setting it to show the correct date/time and my name/phone number on the header, I thought I'd send myself a test to make sure it comes out correct. I happen to use efax, so I get the fax digitally (by email). (Yes, I have a physical machine to send them, and an efax to receive them. I work from home and don't want to allocate a phone line for receiving them or deal with getting fax calls at odd hours from international clients, etc. There was a time when I only had the efax and would send faxes from elsewhere, and many are in that boat.)
Anyway, the efax receipt is where upside-down faxes becomes a concern. When I got mine, it was upside down. Of course, I could use software commands to flip/rotate the image. Not too much of a hassle--but if you send a multi-page fax to someone receiving them digitally, they may have to do that for each page, depending on the software.
And besides efax, some some stationary office fax machines now save and forward the fax by email to the intended recipient, or save it for later printing, etc. So this may be more of an issue than it seems at first. If you could know how your fax machine sends faxes, you could think twice about how you load a document before sending.
Of course, if they're just going to print it out, then it doesn't matter. They can flip it in their hands once printed. :-) And you may never have heard a complaint from even a recipient of a digital copy, simply because they don't want to sound like a whiner complaining to you. Indeed, I got a fax from someone today and it was upside down. Once I learned mine did it too, I started to right all this as an email to her, but then I thought a) I didn't want to offend her with so much detail and b) others might benefit from hearing it.
So I offer this as a tip for those who may never have given thought to whether their fax machine sends documents upside down. If you have a chance to try sending a fax from your machine to someone receiving them digitally, you may want to confirm if yours comes to them upside down. Now that I know mine does that, I'll be careful in the future to rotate them myself before printing. :-) I don't expect everyone to do this (nor especially the colleague I traded faxes with today), but if it helps someone, then it will have been worth the time for potential senders and recipients.