Junk Fax

I have one of those all-in-one printers. It scans, it prints, it faxes, it reads camera media, it slices and dices and makes an excellent daiquiri, although the clean up is not worth the trouble. The printer also collates the pages so you don't have to reorder them after it prints out.

I rarely get faxes anymore with the ease of email attachments, but perhaps twice a week I will look down and see a "junk fax" advertising anything from mortgages to cleaning supplies laying face up in the printer cradle. It irritates me that some unsolicited advertiser uses up a sheet of my paper and a my ink cartridge touting something that I am absolutely not interested in. Usually I leave it there so I can use the other side of the paper for something that needs to be printed as a draft.

I also have a son who attends UCLA as a linguistics major. Most of his work is done and delivered on line but occasionally he needs to print out a hard copy to hand in. When that happens he uses my printer. It's not the only way I contribute to his education, but perhaps the easiest.

Recently he had a long paper due that included a discussion about the California economic crisis. As is the family trait, he waited till the last possible minute to print it out. In fact this particular assignment printed out only moments before he needed to be back at school to turn it in. He grabbed the print out, quickly stapled the pages together and made the mad dash through LA traffic to Westwood.

The paper was returned to him yesterday. He got a good grade, with a few corrections from the Professor, but a large question mark regarding the last page. The Professor wrote in the margins that he didn't understand the relevance of that page to the rest of the paper. He suggested that Taylor stop by and explain it when he had the chance.

The page in question was extolling the virtues of a local janitorial service with reasons why it made good economic sense to hire that company for cleaning needs. It was a "junk fax" that was in the cradle under the actual paper and got stapled to the assignment in the rush.

From that UCLA Professor's point of view, one of his students has a plan to solve the California budget crisis with effective management of cleaning needs.

Cleaning up California's government would seem to be a very relevant idea.

As you were,

Jay