On faxing

I have spent the last week poring over a list of fall/winter releases from Publisher's Weekly and making my own, much-shorter-but-probably-still-too-long list of books I'd like to review. Or rather, books I'd like to review and books appropriate for a college-age audience and about which I am at least somewhat curious (e.g. this one). So at the end I have myself a nice little Excel spreadsheet full of all sorts of books: literary fiction, mysteries, cookbooks, a hip knitting how-to, plenty of memoirs and the odd book about sports.

Requesting books from publishers typically requires faxing, and I am not much of a faxer. Should I not find employment in the profession of my choice, I will not be able to fall back on my secretarial skills, as I cannot touch type and office equipment strikes me as strange and mysterious. I have gone through this routine before, but it was a couple of years ago and I think I may have tricked the receptionist at the time into doing it for me. (I do not necessarily condone the helpless-little-girl routine, but neither am I necessarily above it. It's how I got all of my hotdogs cooked at the bluegrass festival last year.)

Anyway, faxing: It still seems a little magical to me. I don't have the faintest idea how it's accomplished, but I feed a piece of paper into a machine, and a few minutes later an underpaid intern pulls another piece of paper out of another machine. At least that's how it's supposed to work. Perhaps because it requires a slightly higher skill level than emailing, I don't quite trust myself to execute the task correctly, even though I have been shown how to do it several times by the exceedingly patient Dax and Robbie. I have probably been sending blank pages to offices all across Publisher's Row.

Or at least I will assume so until the first book appears in my mailbox.