FaxRelay feature
We had a client who was a national account and they had branches everywhere. There were long distance zone surcharges on phone calls at the time, but there were overlapping zones. A quirk of the time in New Zealand.
So they thought about it and had a relay that printed and forwarded the price list updates or something like that to all branches with one fax. Each branch was configured to print and forward if it came from a certain number to the next one in the chain and of course the actual config was different from branch to branch so it was a pain to configure. Somehow this became the responsibility of the fax installer because the sales person said so to get the deal.
This is a story I believe because I still work with someone who had to implement their area's part of the national solution.
Another time when I was fixing the good old Laser Fax made by Lanier. It may have been a rebranded Toshiba engine? A real beast of a machine that could do anything from FM (analogue with a fantastic greyscale gradient but SLOW) to CCIT G4 with JBIG. Anyways, it was at a Gerontology Professor's Office at UBC in Vancouver Canada and once a year they had to receive faxes from a field office that just had a Satellite phone hooked up to a fax at a field office in a remote African camp. I would arrive and dumb down the config of the machine so it would NOT drop the call! Dropping the call was super expensive and there was bad jitter which would mess up MH encoding, delay on ACK signals etc. Many things got turned off and the max speed was dramatically reduced but the call would not drop and the graphs were legible without line artifacts that would cause bad science. I did that once a year for about 5 years in a row.
Good times.
