#Stately: Faxing Denoted "Strenuous Activity"

by Natalie Herzog
October 4, 2006

Employees who use and operate a fax machine during the course of a regular business week are more subject to aches, pains and bronchial whiplash than those who do not, a new study reports.

The HSBN Study, released Sunday in the monthly journal of The Healthy Workplace Society, cites a study whose subjects went back and forth to the machine and had to not only operate the numeric keypad to send out faxes, but pens and paper to log incoming faxes. Certain test subjects were also required to pick up a thirty-two ounce stack of incoming faxes and place new incoming pages at the bottom of the stack.

"It's a rather remarkable study with results that will send shockwaves across offices worldwide," Dr. Horrace J. Miller, MD.F. said. "It is something that too many people have dealt with for too long and now perhaps they can be compensated in some way."

Locally, the results are good news to State Auditing Agency employee Vicki Scott, a sixteen-year employee who has been faxing day-in-and-day-out every day of her life on the job. "Yeah, I even started the faxing program here," she said obnoxiously, "So I know firsthand the problems better than any of the new people. Just yesterday I went to the machine at the end of the day and there was at least 22 or 82 pages that had come in - I'm not sure which. But I had to log them all in one by one and work after hours to get it done. And then there was all the faxes people worked the last ten minutes of the day to send out. But [co-worker] Kyla [Adams] can do those tomorrow - if she's here. Cause sometimes she isn't. And I can see she's not here because my eyes work, but not very well since I have had forty-two concussions in the last decade and my skin is too tight around the ears. I'm from Montana so I should know."

Others debunk the results.

"It's just an easy way to make something minute, like faxing, seem technical and something for skilled laborers so that it sounds more important," Johnny Sanchez, state employee and Scott's supervisor, said. "On the whole, the results sound pretty suspicious and lean to what the pollsters wanted. In house, I've never seen anyone take a week off from faxing too much. Well, at least three times in as many months. People bitch too much as it is, and this gives them a chance to find something to latch on to as support, however pathetic it is."

Miller, however, sees the outcome something that he and his staff are proud of. "It's unclear at this point how this can change the workplace environment as we know it. Years down the line, faxing won't be thought of as the health risk it is today. Those who flail our results today are probably those who will need them tomorrow."