Our (unpublished) fax number has been discovered by the slimy junk fax industry, and thus we receive frequent junk faxes through our old G4 PowerPC which is now a dedicated (and expensive) fax machine and Now Contact Up To Date server, and backup iTunes server. All faxes received get saved as PDF files to our main networked drive, and automatically printed to a networked laserjet printer. Supposedly, the FCC will take action against junk fax companies, but they haven't been able to stop the scum from operation as far as we can tell. Junk email and junk snail mail I tolerate, slightly, since I don't have to pay for printing out the crap - junk faxes use my toner, my paper, and my time deleting them from my network. (Update, I actually have started saving them to use in a future lawsuit)
This morning, annoyed by something, on a whim, I decided I would fax something back to the number so kindly provided. Glancing through my saved documents, I found a 2965 page PDF which was saved from Billmon's Whiskey Bar (wiki entry here), April 7, 2004. Adobe Acrobat Pro has a feature that will capture a website, and also follow all the links included at the site, in this case to the NYT, WaPo, other blogs, IMDb, Google, and elsewhere. For some reason, I thought of capturing several news websites and blogs on my birthday that year, to save in a time capsule or something. Who knows, I might read it 10 years from now, if I still have the file, and we aren't living underwater with gills.
I faxed 150 copies of this document to the junk fax site with a polite note requesting my name be removed from their database. We'll see if I get more gifts from them in the future. I was going to just make a solid black page, and send that, but maybe next time. I could just photocopy my buttocks. Hmmmm.
Petty, yes. Strangely satisfying? yes, that too.
There is another possible option, but the required contract was a bit long, and I decided I didn't really want to give that much personal information to some legal organization discovered on the web. I may still follow some advice at the www.junkfax.org site, depending upon how annoyed I get. And apparently, I'm not the first to come up with the idea of faxing stuff back.
